Introductory Matters: What Theory Does, Why Theory Lives
I. “Theory is [undead] everywhere”
On the first page of his book The Literary in Theory, veteran theorist Jonathan Culler takes up the question of his discipline’s decline. Acknowledging that “the heyday of so-called high theory” is over, Culler concedes that “the activities that have come to answer to the nickname theory are no longer the latest thing in the humanities” (2007: 1).
Most up-to-date observers in and of the humanities would agree with Culler’s assessment. Some have concluded, and not exactly sadly, that theory has had it, that “theory is dead” (2007: 1). Others—who had never been all that fond of “the activities” Culler designates anyway—no doubt believe that “this thing called theory” (Surin 2011: 6) never should have “lived” in the first place, that “the thing” never should have gained its prominence in literary studies, much less its supposed dominance of the field. Thus, Kenneth Surin, reporting on theory’s present condition in a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled “Theory Now,” describes the current academic situation in terms of a “presumed or merely posited ‘after’ of theory, now fashionable in certain parts of the profession (as in ‘the days of theory are over, so let’s get back to doing literary studies in a way that really focuses on novels, plays, and poems, etc.’).” Surin also describes the long-smoldering “ressentiment of intellectual conservatives who detest theory because for them it ensued in the alleged sidelining of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, and so on (as in ‘how dare you place this Egyptian or Pakistani novelist in the same literary-analytical framework as Faulkner or Günter Grass?’)” (2011: 3).
Here, Surin alerts us to two related aspects of the death-wish against theory—theory-haters hate theory and are more than happy to think it dead because “the thing” in its heyday debased, degraded, or “decentered” literary studies, spoiling intellectually conservative parties either by taking the focus away from novels, poems, and plays as novels, poems, and plays (in order to harp on “non-literary” matters such as popular culture, identity politics, class struggle, etc.), or by staying more or less in the literary ballpark, but sidelining the canonical figures of Great Literature’s all-star team (Surin’s famously named white male players), sticking in a slew of non-white and perhaps non-male “others” in their stead (Surin’s unnamed and ungendered Egyptians and Pakistanis).
But let’s not fail to mention a third, “aesthetic” or “stylistic” factor in the longstanding resentment against theory—the obstreperous complaints about the sheer ugliness of theoretical writing, its abrasively off-putting opacity, its outrageous dependence on “specialized terminology,” on bloated and clunky “in-group jargon,” cumbersome “critical keywords” such as “defamiliarization” and “reification” that not only sound unlovely to belletristic ears but refuse all nimble definition.
Little wonder, then, given such unforgiven trespasses against all the finer things in academic life, if no few “intellectual conservatives” think their world a better place for theory’s being dead. But while the actual extent of its dominion over literary studies, or the exact duration of its heyday, or the aesthetic or even ethical value of its stylistic infractions against clarity and grace may all be open to debate, it’s surely premature for intellectuals of any stripe to mourn or celebrate the expiration of theory, to wring or clap our hands about theory’s demise. Like it or not, “the thing” still lives. Theory persists. Theory abides. Granted, the activities that answer to the nickname “theory” may no longer be the latest thing in the humanities, but they do seem to have become lasting things. They endure—though not, let’s note, as stony monuments of unageing intellect or otherwise solidified things (after all, resisting so-called reification remains one of theory’s most vital and pressing assignments). Rather, theoretical activities continue as, precisely, activities, actions, restlessly critical procedures producing “insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions” (Žižek 2006: ix). Extending its shelf-life beyond any number of sell-by dates, theory survives as a battery of disturbing questions, an unsettled and unsettling set of strategies for enabling what Culler calls “reflection on meaning as a problem rather than a given” (2007: 85).1
Given reasonable suspicion that “meaning” may never cease to be a “problem,” given reasonable confidence that there will never spring from the earth nor fall from the sky some “completely meaningful” and universally satisfying answer that would lay all critical inquiry to eternal rest, given reasonable doubt that “common sense, or even reification itself, can ever permanently be dissipated” (Jameson 2009: 4), one might brashly forecast that “this thing called theory” will go on forever—or at least, for as long as “the humanities” remain an ongoing concern within a recognizably human reality. For even if “theory itself is [no longer] seen as the cutting edge . . . of literary and cultural studies,” even if theory is no longer considered “prominent as a vanguard movement” within these fields, the fields themselves nonetheless “take place within a space articulated by theory, or theories, theoretical discourses, theoretical debates.” Those of us who still work “in the humanities” are “ineluctably in theory,” as Culler writes, for in the humanities, “theory is everywhere” (2007: 3, 2). Or, as Jean-Michel Rabaté puts it in his book The Future of Theory, “theory never stops coming back” (2002: 10).
Far from having kicked the bucket, then, theory is resolutely undead, permanently relevant and perpetually revenant—if not “everywhere” that can be imagined, then at least in and to “the humanities” as they are still being imagined and re-imagined. For in Culler’s words:
the position of theory as an institutional and disciplinary presence now seems well established in the American university . . . It now seems widely accepted that any intellectual project has a basis in theory of some sort, that graduate students need to be aware of theoretical debates in their fields and able to situate themselves and their work within the changing intellectual structures of the professional landscape, and that theory, far from being ‘too difficult’ for undergraduates, is the sort of thing they ought to explore as one of the most exciting and socially pertinent dimensions of the humanities. (Culler 2011: 224)
This book hopes to serve participants in the humanities at all levels as both an introduction and an inducement to theoretical writing as writing against reification, writing against the commodification of writing and of thought. Of course, resisting the commodification of writing in writing isn’t particularly easy these days, especially not if one feels compelled, for professional reasons, to present the putative resistance in a commodified form—to publish, that is, one’s writing as a book that one “naturally” hopes will be commercially successful, that is, “widely adopted” as a textbook. And of course, there are many textbooks, many introductions and inducements to theory, available in “the intellectual marketplace today” (Jameson 2009: 61). Most of these begin with matters of definition; they attempt to describe what theory is and to provide an historical narrative about how this thing came to be such a strong (or insidious) “institutional and disciplinary presence.” In this introduction, however, we’ll be concerned less with what theory is and more with what theory does. Our most vital concern will be with the question of why theory lives or why theory matters, why theory excitingly pertains not only to students “of the humanities,” but to all “the undead”—to everyone, that is, who still actively participates in our specifically human reality, if only in the spectral form of writing.
Culler, for one, writes that theory can be understood as an interdisciplinary “genre of works,” as a “name for a mixture of philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, aesthetics, poetics, and political and social thought” (2011: 230). But again, we might more productively understand theoretical writing less as an institutionally generic thing (even an academically mixed-up thing) than as an “exciting and socially pertinent” intellectual activity. For Culler, what theory is is the activity of “thinking about thinking”; correspondingly, in his words, the “impetus to theory is a desire to understand what one is doing” when one is thinking. Culler thinks that theory, as a particularly challenging way of “thinking about thinking,”
is driven by the impossible desire to step outside one’s thought, both to place it and to understand it, and also by a desire—a possible desire—for change, both in the ways of one’s own thought, which always could be sharper, more knowledgeable and capacious, more self-reflecting, and in the world our thought engages. (2011: 224–5)
Here, Culler’s thinking (about thinking) about theory in terms of a desire for change “in the ways of one’s own thought” might make one think of the following bit of wisdom from Michel Foucault—“There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all” (1986: 7). But thinking about theoretical writing in terms of desire for change—change not simply in our own individual modes of cognition but “in the world” itself—might also bring to mind the revolutionary slogan carved in marble at the tomb of Karl Marx—“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (1845/1978: 145). Culler’s thinking, however, leads him to quote a somewhat more densely packed sentence from Michael Hardt, who, in an essay called “The Militancy of Theory,” writes that “the task of theory is to make the present and thus to . . . invent the subject of that making, a ‘we’ characterized not only by our belonging to the present but by our making it” (2011: 21). Culler goes on to suggest that Hardt here “makes explicit what is only implicit in a lot of theory: the attempt to produce a collective subject, a ‘we,’ through argument about how things should be conceived or understood” (2011: 225).
Now, while Hardt clearly owes his theoretical militancy both to Marx and to Foucault, his quoted sentence might require a bit more “unpacking” than either one of theirs. And indeed we’ll be returning throughout this book to the question of what it might mean to argue (1) that what Hardt calls “the present” is never simply given but must always be made; (2) that a collectively subjective “we” both belongs to and is responsible for making “the present” historical moment; (3) that the “we” in question must itself be invented or produced; and (4) that theoretical writing is somehow constitutively involved in this vital activity or task, this job of our self-actualizing “the world,” of our restlessly producing the very subject of human reality—in other words, “ourselves.”
As I said, Hardt’s sentence calls for some strenuous and extended unpacking. Here, though, let’s linger on that last phrase from Culler concerning the desired “production” of this collective subject, a certain “we ourselves” that somehow gets produced “through argument about how things should be conceived or understood,” and let’s ask ourselves how, in theory, things arguably should be conceived or understood. What’s the difference, after all, between the way things should theoretically be conceived or understood and the normal or given way in which things are commonly conceived or understood? Moreover, how does our recognizing this difference—this discrepancy between the good or rich or productive understanding that arguably should be and the bad or impoverished or reified understanding that commonly is—impel us toward what Slavoj Žižek is happy to call “insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions” (2006: ix)? What allows a theoretical writer like Žižek to propose that “our common perceptions” really should be “short-circuited,” as he puts it, that they really ought to be utterly shattered and undermined?2
These questions bring us back to the matter of “reification,” as that crucial term is defined above, and to Horkheimer and Adorno’s insistence that the “true concern” of any bona fide theoretical work is “the negation of reification” (1947/2002: xvii). For theorists like Žižek and Hardt, who write in the critical tradition of Horkheimer and Adorno, of Marx and of Foucault, “reification” and its “common-sense” confederates pose fairly formidable obstacles to theory’s most militant task, diligently working to try to block “our” collective and transformative remaking of the present historical moment. For whenever “we” find ourselves doing the business of “thinking” within an utterly reified social order—the current global capitalist “mode of production,” for example, “a world in which corporate Capital [has] succeeded in penetrating and dominating the very fantasy-kernel of our being” (Žižek 1993: 10)—chances are mighty high that “our common perceptions” of that social order, not to mention of “our being,” will be pretty much “reified” themselves, and thus the odds of our finding ways to think or dream or use our critical imaginations against that order can grow quite dismally slim. Arguably, our habitual tendency to conceive or understand “things as they are” in our given human reality as things—specifically, as commodities to be purchased (if only we can afford them), and not as productively human and collectively humanizing processes—is symptomatic of “our” pervasive cognitive and affective reification today. For are we not commonly “encouraged” by “corporate Capital” to conceive absolutely “everything” imaginable in commodified or globally “free market” terms, and to perceive “ourselves,” in our very being, as primarily and essentially consumers (with or without purchasing power) rather than as subjectively collective makers of the present, much less as “citizens of the world” empowered and engendered by the work of our own self-reflective understanding?
Theory, as Culler notes, is indeed driven by the desire for change both in ourselves and of “the world,” and so the task of theory, as Hardt insists, is indeed to make the present—or better, to participate in the radical transformation of the present by negating regnant reifications, by working to shatter and undermine our common and congealed perceptions, particularly the all too common-sense view that “we ourselves” are not the actual (and sole) producers of our present (and future) human realities but merely passive consumers of “things as they are,” customers who are “always right” (to think of themselves as customers) and who are thus all too well accustomed to taking or buying into “the world” as given.
Describing what he calls “the duty of the critical intellectual,” and using the words “theory” and “philosophy” more or less interchangeably, Žižek writes that
philosophy begins the moment we do not accept what exists as given (“It’s like that!”, “Law is law!”, etc.), but raise the question of how is what we encounter as actual also possible. What characterizes philosophy is this “step back” from actuality into possibility . . . Theory involves the power to abstract from our starting point in order to reconstruct it subsequently on the basis of its presuppositions, its transcendental “conditions of possibility.” (1993: 2)
Žižek, then, would pretty much agree with Culler’s point that theory’s central task is to reflect “on meaning as a problem rather than a given” (Culler 2007: 85). But how might this job-description relate to the more militant claim that theory’s most serious business is negating reification? Since both activities would seem to constitute the real work of theoretical writing, shouldn’t we ask how reflecting on “meaning as a problem rather than a given” and “negating reification” might be practically related? The quickest answer to this question would of course be that “taking meaning as a given” essentially equals accepting or “buying into” reification. But since we wouldn’t be doing our homework if we were simply to accept that quick answer, take that neat equation as a given, we must rather address it as a problem, must explore its problematic “conditions of possibility.”
To proceed with this labor, let’s put aside the term “reification” for the moment and focus instead on this tension between “the given” and “the problematic” in the general field of “meaning.” What might it mean to reflect on “meaning” as a problem rather than a given? What might it mean to take some specific instance of meaning “as a given” in the first place? Well, even in our common understanding, wouldn’t our accepting any piece of meaning as “a given” actually mean our taking its “actuality” pretty easily, with little or no questioning about its conditions of possibility? And wouldn’t that “easiness” entail that the more we take a particular piece of “meaning” as “a given,” the fewer the questions we’re likely to raise about it? What “given meanings” would thus seem to be given, whenever such easy reception prevails, is a facile sort of freedom from analysis, a reprieve from “thinking about thinking,” a sort of well-lubricated immunity from any abrasive “problematization.”
In theory, however, no meaning should ever be taken as a given. No piece of meaning, no particular idea, ever gets a free pass. Or, paradoxically, the only idea that might safely be taken as a given is the idea that no idea should ever be so taken. The only idea that isn’t open to question, the only idea that isn’t problematic, is the idea that any idea can and should be frequently and vigorously problematized, if not completely shattered and undermined.
But let’s consider a specific example of a “given” whose license to be taken as “given” theoretical writing has attempted to revoke. For quite some time, “in the humanities” and elsewhere, it was pretty much taken as a given that the word “Man” simply meant all the human beings in the history of the world—the total “horizon of humanity,” as Jacques Derrida once put it (1972: 116). The usage ranges from early to late modernity, from Prince Hamlet’s “what a piece of work is man” (Hamlet 2.2. 303) to Karl Marx’s “man makes religion; religion does not make man” (1844/1978: 53) to astronaut Neil Armstrong’s moonwalking soliloquy describing, albeit somewhat confusingly, “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The “given” here is (or maybe was) that the word “Man” could self-confidently represent all human beings universally—even though, at any given time, well over half the human beings in the world aren’t exactly men, and even though only a minority of actual men resemble the generically “Anglo-European” image that tends to be conjured by the word “Man.”3 Our taking this “blanched” meaning of the word “Man” as “a given” has always tended to involve “our” either ignoring these contradictions or not seeing them as causing “us” any problems.
Another example—for some time, “in the humanities” and elsewhere, it was taken as a given that the word “Woman” could be deployed to designate not some individual woman or the entirety of the human group “women” (and not, to be sure, “the total horizon of humanity”) but rather some universal and eternal “essence” of “womanliness” or “femininity.” This meaning of the word “Woman” could be taken as a given despite rather glaringly evident tensions between this “essential” determination “Woman” (which for some reason usually involved such dispositions as passivity, masochism, or infinite willingness to self-sacrifice) and the characteristics, situations, experiences, or desires of actual women.
Considering these two examples together, then, we might belabor the obvious—that the heretofore “given” meanings of “Man” and “Woman” have involved a pervasive inequality, that what this particular “given” has historically given “us” is the strong impression that the phrase “Man and Woman” has always meant and should forever inevitably mean the hierarchical difference between the one’s taking giant steps and the other’s being stepped on or over. In other words, here the “given meaning” has done its bit to “naturalize” or “inevitable-ize” or “eternalize” systemic male dominance, sexism, racism, and so on. If the situation today has to some extent been altered—at least “in the humanities,” if not elsewhere, and thanks mainly to feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theorists—then the words “Man” and “Woman” are no longer employed quite so facilely in these essentialized senses, no longer taken quite so broadly as givens.4
As these examples suggest, what theory does when reflecting on meaning as a problem rather than a given is to foreground the contradictions embedded in the “meaning” under consideration. We might note, for another example, a contradiction in Culler’s very phrase, for arguably one actively reflects on “meaning” only as a problem—that is, critically “reflecting on” and “problematizing” are pretty much the same procedure—whereas to take meaning “as a given” is precisely not to reflect on it but merely to reflect it, to repeat and reproduce it, like a mirror, without question, without friction. In this sense, a successfully “given” meaning is (rather like a sexually transmitted disease) the gift that keeps on giving. If I myself should take some piece of meaning as given, I will probably expect you to partake as well, to “repeat after me,” to join me as I have joined others in a reified set of “common perceptions,” a coagulated sort of “common sense,” “a stagnant confirmation of inherited thinking, its presuppositions, and its dogma” (Derrida 2008: 120).
Theory, however, isn’t going to take it. In actively reflecting on meaning as problem, theoretical writing attempts to disrupt or short circuit the reproduction of “common sense.” Theory, writes Culler, must always engage in the “critique of common sense, of concepts taken as natural” (1997: 15). Theoretical writers in fact decline to take any human activity “naturally,” for “as long as one assumes that what one does is natural it is difficult to gain any understanding of it” (Culler 1975: 129). And, as Michael Bérubé has recently put it, “It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his tribal sense of his identity depends on his not understanding it. But,” Bérubé adds, “there are few tasks so urgent” (2011: 74) for theoretical writers and readers—few tasks so urgent or so arduous as trying to get ourselves to understand arguments that our “tribal” or inherited sense of identity, our stable or “naturalized” common sense, necessitates our not understanding. Fredric Jameson thus writes of the daunting “un-naturality” of theoretical writing, “its provocative and perverse challenge to common sense as such” (2009: 4). Abrading, then, any and all “natural” or common-sense assumptions, theoretical writing promotes instead an unnatural and uncommon sensibility, an extraordinary or even anti-ordinary understanding. Theory, that is, endeavors to defamiliarize all the settled normalities of the given world.5 And this “creative abrasion” (Hall 2003: 71) of “common sense” constitutes the primary reason theoretical writing isn’t often “easily understood”— theoretical writing is by definition hostile to “normal” understanding and to the familiar versions of “the normal world” such understanding attempts to secure, and this very hostility makes it difficult for us to be secure in our understanding of theory.6
We’ll return to the matter of theory’s alienating “difficulty” anon. Here, though, let’s pause to mull over yet another contradiction—this one located in my own exposition of theory’s self-reflections. A moment ago, I gave you “Man” and “Woman” as examples of meanings that had until recently been taken as givens in the humanities but that had gotten themselves roundly “problematized” at the hands of “high theory.” My intent was to offer the following as quick examples of theoretical “problematizations” of these given terms.
In regard to “Man,” I intended to quote from the final pages of The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, where Michel Foucault writes that “man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge,” that “man is an invention of recent date,” that the invented convention of man is “perhaps nearing its end,” and that the figure of man will someday “be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (1966/1973: 386, 387). But I intended to stress that when Foucault heralds the erasure of “man,” he isn’t predicting or calling for the extinction of the human species; rather, Foucault is signaling that a particular figure of meaning that had for some time been taken as the most central and meaningful figure in “the human sciences” and in humanism in general now no longer could or should be.7
Regarding “Woman,” I intended to point out that when Jacques Lacan proclaims that “Woman does not exist” (1975/1998: 7) he is not insanely positing that there are no women in the world. Rather, he is asserting that “Woman”—specifically, the eternally, masochistically self-sacrificing Woman—is “essentially” a fiction, if not a pathologically self-serving male fantasy.8 I also intended to explain that when Monique Wittig avers that a “lesbian” is “not a woman” (1981/2007: 1642), she doesn’t mean that “lesbians” are not “chromosomally female” or don’t “have vaginas,” and so on and so forth, but rather that “woman” is a political category invented by men for the purpose of maintaining systemic male dominance, and that lesbians, by definition, refuse the category as well as the system (not to mention the men).
But here’s the problem. By introducing these particular examples, I basically wanted to tout my investment in feminist, psychoanalytic, and queer disturbances of the “given” meanings of gender and sexuality as among the most excitingly and politically pertinent activities that theoretical writing brings to the table. And yet, in the very gesture of offering these examples, I unintentionally reproduced one of the primary “givens” of masculinist privilege itself. I trotted out “Man” first, because, for some strange reason, that example occurred to me first. And in maintaining this particular order of introduction, I unconsciously repeated—and effectively reinforced or “re-reified”—an ancient order of male priority, a dogmatic fable as old as Adam. In attempting, that is, to conscientiously reflect on “Man” as a problem rather than a given, I unconsciously reflected “Man” as the given rather than as an outdated problem.
Now, upon recognizing my own complicity with the very order of systemic male privilege and priority that I was ostensibly writing against, I could have easily revised my writing, resituated the examples, let “Woman” come first, given Wittig the first or only words, and so on. I could have neatly hidden the traces of my being unconsciously in cahoots with patriarchy, and no reader of my work would have been any the wiser. But since I should aspire to make my readers at least somewhat wiser—or, since theory’s purpose is to “negate reification,” and reification can be defined not only as commodified “thingification” but “as the removal of traces of production from the product” (Jameson 2010: 124)—I’ve chosen to let these infelicitous “traces of production” stand and to call your attention to them. I do so not to make myself momentarily look “bad” for having made the mistake and then “good” for having “politically corrected” it but rather to attempt further to illuminate what theory does, to describe theoretical activities while attempting in the process to do some theory, to attend to a contradiction and elucidate (but not exactly solve) a problem. “Theory,” writes Culler, “is reflexive, thinking about thinking, enquiry into the categories we use in making sense of things, in literature and in other discursive practices” (1997: 15). But theoretical writing is also always necessarily self-reflexive critique; it devotes considerable energy to thinking about (its own thinking about) thinking. Reflecting on meaning as problem rather than as naturalized given, theoretical writing is given or driven not only to reflect upon but also to interrogate, if not to torture, its own reflections—apparently to cause yet more problems.
But why keep causing problems? Why this endless “problematization” of “meanings” that might just as well be taken for granted? Why not let just a few things go without saying? Why keep trying to make sense (or mincemeat) of the categories we use to make sense of things? Why not just keep using these categories if they have heretofore served us well? In regard to “literature and other discursive practices,” why all the “complicated fuss about things that really should be simply consumed” (Culler 2007: 251) or unproblematically enjoyed? Why not simply relish reading for the sake of reading, literature for the sake of literature? Why not gratefully accept “the pleasure of the text” as gift, pure and simple?
A short response to these questions would be that there is really no such thing as pure enjoyment, or simple pleasure, much less simple meaning, for any specifically human being. To say so is not bleakly to proclaim that there is absolutely no enjoyment, pleasure, value, or meaning ever to be had (contrary to rumor, that is, theory is not a thoroughly anhedonic nihilism); rather, it is “simply” to say, with Jacques Derrida, that “things are very complicated” (1994: 110); it is “simply” to say, with Jean-Luc Nancy, that “the given always gives itself as something other than simply given” (2002: 52), that human experiences qua human are never pure or simple, if only because in reality a human being is “an animal at the mercy of language” (Lacan 1966e/2006: 525) and “language being what it is, we shall find nothing simple in it” (Saussure 1959: 122). In other words, given this radical absence of simplicity in language, given the irremediable loss of immediately natural life for any speaking being as such, the gift of the text can never be a simple present, for “what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence” (Derrida 1967/1997: 159). Or, in the words of Marjorie Garber:
Language is not a secondary but a primary constituent of human nature . . . Language is not transparent, though fantasies of its transparency, its merely denotative role, have always attracted and misled some of its users, both writers and readers. (2003/2008: 437–8)
So much, then, for any short sweet reply to the question of simple enjoyment; evidently, a more extensive response is needed. And indeed, this more extensive response, which must account for why all of the preceding might actually be the case, which must explain why writing involves the disappearance of natural presence, why simplicity has gone forever missing from language, why speaking can be said to necessitate a loss of immediacy, why the transparency of language is an attractive but misleading fantasy, why the terms “human,” “being,” “meaning,” “nature,” “presence,” “language,” “text,” “writers,” “readers,” “enjoyment,” and so on, must all ceaselessly be called into complicated question—“dereifed into a complex set of human acts” (Jameson 2009: 47) rather than simply taken as natural givens—will take up the remainder of Ten Lessons in Theory.
III. Just being difficult/difficultly being just
If language itself “is not transparent,” as Marjorie Garber stresses, theoretical writing is rather notoriously not so even more so, and in his introduction to Critical Terms for Literary Study, Thomas McLaughlin provides some clear and compelling explanations for theory’s abrasive complexities and opacities. McLaughlin writes that “the very project of theory is unsettling. It brings assumptions into question. It creates more problems than it solves. And, to top it off, it does so in what is often a forbidding and arcane style.” But McLaughlin maintains that “theory isn’t difficult out of spite.” Rather, theoretical writing is always rough going
because it has proceeded on the premise that language itself ought to be its focus of attention; that ordinary language is an embodiment of an extremely powerful and usually unquestioned system of values and beliefs; and that using ordinary language catches you up in that system. Any discourse that was to uncover and question that system had to find a language, a style, that broke from the constraints of common sense and ordinary language. Theory set out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play. There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully . . . that the very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer. (1995: 2)
For Culler, as we’ve seen, what theory does is reflect on meaning as a problem rather than a given. McLaughlin, however, puts Culler’s case more strongly, asserting that theoretical texts do not merely reflect on meaning but sometimes go so far as to “powerfully” resist it. And these texts don’t just resist some specific instance of meaning; rather, theoretical texts “resist meaning” altogether, resist meaning itself. They attempt to break free from those “constraints of common sense and ordinary language” that systematically regulate the ostensible given-ness of meaning, that work to make sure “our common perceptions” pretty much stay common. Theoretical texts attempt to liberate us as readers from these commonly normative constraints since our very use of ordinary language is said to catch us up in this disciplinary system. Moreover, in their attempted break with conventionalized meaning, these texts endeavor to provoke in their readers a salutary failure to comprehend the very discourses that are offered up for comprehension. Promising a strange sort of freedom through cognitive failure, theoretical texts attempt to engage us in what Gayatri Spivak calls “moments of productive bafflement” (1999: 273).
Should readers, then, take these baffling texts up on their offers and feel licensed to give up even trying to comprehend their meanings? By no means, for the unsettling “freedom through failure” of which I write above has nothing to do with the normalizing “freedom from analysis” to which I earlier alluded. Theory, that is, never gets us out of work, never frees us from the responsibility to read. Even in their most rebarbative moments of unreadability, theoretical texts mean not to repel readers but rather to encourage us to take the risk of getting caught up in the potentially productive process of unsuccessful processing. Theoretical writing offers us the opportunity to reflect not only on comprehensible meaning but on the very conventions of comprehension that make “meaning itself” possible. Ceaselessly questioning what it means to mean, theory provocatively and perversely encourages us to challenge “the categories we use in making sense of things” (Culler 1997: 15), to inquire into the origin of these categories and of our places within them, to ask about their conditions of possibility as well as our own. Theory encourages such inquiry even if it involves the risk of comprehensive failure, the risk of “not getting it,” of losing certainty, losing “clarity,” losing the ability to “make sense” in the ways to which we’re normally accustomed, the ways in which we’ve in fact been formally trained. I repeat the word “encourages” here because I believe it requires something like courage to go against one’s training, to risk losing or disrupting one’s ability to “make sense of things” in one’s accustomed or inherited or “tribal” ways. But what makes the risk worth taking is the possibility of discovering new and different ways of making sense of things—of the world, of the text, of oneself, of one’s life—in this “unprocessable” process. For once again, “There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all” (Foucault 1986: 7).
Before going on with these reflections, however, I’d like to touch on two theses regarding the way theoretical writing disturbs our normal procedures of “making sense” and provokes us to “think differently,” to see “things as they are” otherwise. The first thesis—to my mind, a permanently and radically “de-reifying” one—is that “sense” must indeed always be made, must always be fashioned or fabricated or produced, and by none other than our own all-too-human hands. Making sense—like “making the present” in Michael Hardt’s theoretically militant sense—is nothing if not human labor; human reality is nothing if not a piece of work. To employ a sentence from Stuart Hall that will be put to much more strenuous labor in this book’s first lesson—“The world must be made to mean” (1998: 1050), which means that neither “sense” nor “meaning” ever grows on trees or falls from the sky, that there’s nothing “natural” or “supernatural” about these phenomena. To be sure, common sense and given meaning have often relied upon ideas of “nature” and/or the Deity to guarantee, legitimate, or otherwise prop up their own reproduction, to stabilize or “fix” themselves as steadily lucid signs. Be forewarned, however, that theoretical writing constitutively refuses “nature” and “God,” emphatically rejects both “biological determinism” and “divine will” as causal factors or explanatory solutions to any of the problems of human meaning. If it weren’t for the fact that theoretical writing also jettisons “Man”—erasing that little stick-figure “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1966/1973: 387)—we might say that theory is a form of secular humanism. Of course, theory is nothing if not secular; it is “firmly and rightly committed to renewing the necessary conviction . . . that thought only begins on the further side of religion” (Gibson 2006: 5); but theoretical writing is often just as resolutely “anti-humanist” as it is decidedly “antinaturalist” and deicidally “anti-theological” (Barthes 1968/1977: 147).
Designating these antagonistic stances as such leads to my second thesis, which is that “theory” is most productively encountered as a “practice of creativity” (Foucault 1983/1997: 262) in itself, a genre of so-called creative writing, an interventional exercise in the art of the sentence. Theoretical writing, that is, warrants being read in the same “close” way that “defamiliarizingly” imaginative literature demands to be read. Indeed, the main premise of this book is that the risk we take in engaging with theoretical writing, the risk of losing the ability to “make sense of things” in our normalized, habituated ways, is intimately related to the risk we take in that “encounter with strangeness” (Bloom 1994: 3), which is (or can be) “the literary experience” itself. Theory, my friends, assumes “the world as text” (Barthes 1968/1977: 147). It engages with a world that must be made to mean as a problem to be interpreted or thought through rather than as a given that “just naturally” goes without saying. Theory is a de-reifying procedure of reading and writing that “refuses to fix meaning” (Barthes 1968/1977: 147) and which, by virtue of that refusal, affirms a world that can only ever be experienced as text, affirms “the very text of your existence” (Lacan 2008: 78), affirms a subjective existence that can only ever be lived “extimately,” inter-textually, as “interpretive experience” (Derrida 1988: 148).
But these affirmations can never be purely “positive.” Theoretical affirmation always depends upon active negation. Theory, that is, enacts or actualizes itself by being antinaturalizing, anti-humanist, anti-theological, anti-essentialist, anti-normative, anti-metaphysical, and so on.9 But to the extent that “negativity can be positively exhilarating” to “a properly literary understanding” (Culler 2011: 228), this actively negative dependence marks theory’s radical affinity with “creative writing,” with “literature.” Theoretical writing, perhaps like all actually creative writing, only ever agonistically affirms. It must negate or say “no” to a host of “givens” in order to say “yes” to what it takes to be the fundamental problem.
But what, for theory, is the fundamental problem? McLaughlin has already told us by pointing out that theory’s enabling premise is “that language itself ought to be its focus of attention”; he further specifies that “the experience of theory . . . ought to engage the reader in a struggle over language and with language” (1995: 3). But we should hastily add that much more is at stake in this “struggle over language” than just some “ivory tower” tussle with terminology. For theoretical writers, this wordy conflict is intimately connected to worldly struggles involving relations of power. Theoretical writing, that is, conceives and understands the fundamental problem as the human power-struggle over meaning, the conflictually “interpretive experience” of all our struggles with and over signs. This agon among animals at the mercy of language is always, at the same time, both a real power-struggle and a “matter of interpretation,” for power, as theoretical writing interprets it, “is both part of material, social reality, and also available to comprehension as a profoundly complex textual structure, operating differentially and discursively” (Wolfreys 2004: 197). In examining and challenging the workings of power, theoretical writers conflate these complex textual or discursive structures with more self-evidently “real world” forms of social, economic, political, and historical striving and strife, those forms of real human suffering, those matters of real life and death, that don’t “normally” seem to have much to do with sentences or textuality or semiotics or discourse—the really important matters that “people in the real world” typically don’t like being “reduced” to “mere words.”10
For theoretical writers, however, the fundamental problem is precisely that these down-to-earth agons never cease to have to do with words, have never been exterior to language, are “always already” irreducibly semiotic. For theoretical writers, the struggle over meaning—a problem as old as polis and papyrus and as new as Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text” (1967/1997: 158)—is what constitutes any human subject, individual or collective, and all human reality as such.11 Theory, that is, interprets the whole of human reality as a “signifying structure” constituting itself through the social production, proliferation, and exchange of signs. But because this totally interpretive experience of socio-symbolic reality is seen in terms of “real-world” struggles over power, most theoretical writing situates a “political perspective” on language, literature, and culture as “the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation” (Jameson 1981: 17).12
Although postmodern theorists tend, as we’ll see, to abjure any “universal,” “totalizing,” or “absolute” claims about human reality, we might note that the preceding paragraph describes little else but universalizing absolutes. Indeed, the word “theory” itself might be considered a “nickname” for all the critical activities that begin to crank up at that moment when, as Derrida puts it, “language invaded the universal problematic and everything became discourse” (1966/1978: 280, my emphases). The “moment” or “event” that Derrida describes is sometimes called “the linguistic turn in the human sciences,” and we could probably do worse than consider the historical emergence of “theory” itself in terms of this all-encompassing “turn.” Jameson, for example, tags the linguistic turn as the very genesis of theory when he writes that “theory begins . . . at the moment it is realized that thought is linguistic or material and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression.” Jameson thus describes theory’s inauguration as well as its continuation “as the coming to terms with materialist language” (2004: 403).13 The postcolonial theorist Rey Chow also commemorates the linguistic turn when she uses the term theory “to mark the paradigm shift . . . whereby the study of language, literature, and cultural forms becomes irrevocably obligated to attend to the semiotic operations involved in the production of meanings, meanings that can no longer be assumed to be natural.” Chow, like Jameson, defines theory as a coming to terms with materialist semiotics, as a way of paying “tenacious attention to the materiality of human signification” (2002/2007:1910).14
Arguably, then, it is through pushing “the linguistic turn” to the extreme— through trying to grasp the most radical consequences of the idea that “everything” has become discourse, has always been discourse, will always be discourse—that theoretical writing both universalizes its political claims and politicizes its universal claims (even its paradoxically universal claims against universalization). Tenaciously attending to the materiality and historicity of all human signification whatsoever, assiduously connecting “all aspects of life and consciousness to the material conditions of existence” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 181), theoretical writing attempts to respond to the contradictions and conflicts embedded in the variously discursive ways in which the world must be made to mean. But responding responsibly to the ways our world means means more than just subjecting it to gnarly “academic” analysis. For Marx, as we’ve read, philosophers have only interpreted the world, while the point must be to change it. In the text called Specters of Marx, however, Derrida writes of “the dimension of performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing that it interprets” (1994: 51). For theoretical writers, then, to interpret the world really can mean to change it—that is, to substantially rewrite it—for the “real world” is “always already” nothing but actively and collectively performative interpretation. If theoretical interpretation involves transformative “thinking about thinking,” theoretical writing involves writing about “writing as the very possibility of change, the [discursive] space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (Cixous 1975/2007: 1646).15
With such subversive thoughts in mind, let’s return to the question of theory’s difficulty, to what we might call its guerilla warfare on “clarity.” McLaughlin, as we’ve read, asserts that theory “isn’t difficult out of spite,” but, to be quite honest, when considering all the possible motivating factors involved in theoretical militancy, I’m not so sure we should rule out “spite” altogether. Nietzsche no doubt had our number when, in the Genealogy of Morals, he linked our most rigorously “objective” intellectual procedures to extremely personal feelings of pique and ressentiment. And no doubt there are some really mean-spirited theoretical writers out there who like nothing better than to shatter your poor common-sense perceptions simply because they can be shattered. But setting aside as much as I can my own considerable meanness of spirit, I would like to suggest that theory’s opacity, while perhaps partly rooted in all-too-human ressentiment, also involves ethical obligation, a sense of political responsibility or social justice. I would like to suggest that what animates most theoretical writing is not a spiteful insistence on “just being difficult” but rather a strenuous commitment to difficultly being just.
To explain this suggestion, I turn back to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. I have already quoted this resolutely “difficult” duo to the effect that “Intellect’s true concern is a negation of reification.” Now, on the same page in which they express this concern, Horkheimer and Adorno also write that “False clarity is only another name for myth” (1947/2002: xvii). By this claim, the authors mean that we may never be more mystified, more benighted by our “primitive” or “tribal” mythologies, than during those still moments when everything seems perfectly obvious, completely unproblematical, when our “common sense” tells us that some premise or perception is clearly absolutely right and true. By the word “myth,” the authors refer specifically to the sort of fearfully reactionary and religious/superstitious worldviews that “enlightenment” thinking (ostensibly rationalist modern philosophy) sought to escape, defeat, or crush (as per the slogan “écrasez l’infáme”—we must crush the infamy!—with which the arch-philosophe Voltaire reportedly signed his letters). In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno are concerned with what they call “enlightenment’s relapse into mythology” (xvi), the way purportedly fearless modern rationalism devolves into a fear-based “instrumental reason” as bloody and oppressive as anything practiced under any ancien regime. Other than mention that the authors see both the rise of European fascism and standardized post-World War II American mass culture (particularly the Hollywood film) as expressions of this intellectual and moral disaster, we can’t rehearse their arguments about enlightenment’s mythological relapses here.
We can note, however, that Horkheimer and Adorno consider “myth” the symptom par excellence of reified thinking. If critical intellect’s true concern is to negate reification, and if “clarity” can function as the calling card of reifying myth, then critical intellect should always be prepared to challenge “clarity” itself. Because in an utterly reified social order, any instance of “clarity” stands a splendid chance of being a myrmidon of “false consciousness,” a promoter of “mass delusion,” the critical intellectual is always obliged to try to kick “clarity” in its transparent pants. In other words, in any culture in which reification reigns, the “duty of the critical intellectual” is to learn to suspect an ideological shell-game at work in the very insistence upon linguistic transparency, to smell something fishy whenever words and sentences appear “to mean” all too axiomatically, all too unproblematically, “all by themselves.” Obviously, then, since “clarity” itself can be the symptom of reification, it follows that one’s attempt to negate reification, to de-reify the language of thought, isn’t likely to be very clear. Indeed, one’s articulation is obligated to be strategically difficult, baffling, defamiliarizing, resistant to facile processing or immediate comprehension.
Of course, for Horkheimer and Adorno, not every single instance of “clarity” in the world of discourse is necessarily “false”; for these guys, clarity is mythological, and hence false, only when it aids and abets reification. But we might understand clarity’s abetting function more clearly if we momentarily drop “reification,” Marxism’s preferred term for the undesirable “fixing” or coagulation of cognitive processes, and employ another word (viz. sedimentation), drawn from a different intellectual tradition (viz. phenomenology), instead. This terminological shift might give us some clarity about what’s at stake in both the formation and the attempted negation of clarity.16
Imagine, if you will, a firmly sedimented foundation at the bottom of some body of standing water. To call this foundation “sedimented” is to say that over a period of time a certain amount of particulate matter has settled down and become stably impacted therein. A direct result of this sedimentary process is that the water above the foundation remains relatively clear. Clearly, however, the water’s present transparency is an effect dependent upon the accomplished sedimentation, upon the previous “settling of matters.” In other words, “clarity” (figured here by the unclouded water) depends upon the sedimentation of complexity (figured here by these particulate “matters” which have been put out of sight, which seem to have just “naturally” gotten themselves “settled”). But if this sedimentary foundation were to be in some way unsettled or de-sedimented—if some trickster were to poke a stick into this soggy bottom and give it a vigorous stir—then all the gritty matters that had long been settled down would come swirling back up into play. And the necessary consequence of this agitation would be the water’s corresponding loss of clarity.
Theory, if you hadn’t guessed, is the stick that stirs this dirty analogy, which is why we should stick with thinking of the very project of theory as unsettling—theoretical writing involves de-sedimenting or disturbingly deconstructive thinking about thinking.17 But contrary to the scatological allegations of those who despise theory and rejoice at the thought of its demise, the main impetus behind the theoretical “movement” in literary studies was never simply to dump a load of “fashionable nonsense” into the ordinarily clear and calm waters of thoughtful minds. Despite appearances, theory does not aspire to foul placidly apodictic streams of consciousness, but it very much desires to disturb the waters, to stir up matters seemingly long settled, all the better to “completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions” (Žižek 2006: ix). Or, in somewhat ruder words, originally issuing from the lips of queer theorist Judith Halberstam, theoretical writing really just wants “to fuck shit up” (2006: 824), and so this writing sticks its abrasive questions and irritating keywords deep into the sedimented foundations and mythological fantasies that underpin ideational clarity—which means that we can basically stick “anti-foundationalism” pretty high up on our expanding list of theory’s antagonistic stances.
In the following pages, we’ll explore the dire consequences of what is no doubt theory’s most radically “anti-foundational” insight, emerging directly from the aforementioned linguistic turn—this would be the “structuralist” perception that signs “do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations” (Culler 1975: 5), that “in language there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure 1972/1986: 118), that “no signification can be sustained except by reference to another signification” (Lacan 1966e/2006: 415), and so on. For now, we’ll “simply” observe that, from a theoretical perspective, no single instance of linguistic or ideational “clarity” can ever just simply, transparently, meaningfully be; nor can “meaning” ever securely rest upon a naturally or supernaturally firm foundation, some reassuringly “real bedrock” of metaphysical truth. Rather, from a theoretical perspective, a perspective which always desires to bring about “a desedimentation of . . . encrusted determinations” (Smith 2002: xi), mythological clarity, ordinary language, plain common sense, given meaning, absolute truth, and so on—this whole crusty and determined gang—are all only the ideological effects of a naturalizing, essentializing, familiarizing, or normalizing suppression of other meanings, the repression of extraordinary signs. These assorted “betrayals of repressed human possibilities” (Derrida 2008: 105) work together as an active forgetting, a forced amnesia about alternative intelligibilities. While no meaning is sustained except by reference to another meaning, some meaning—namely, clearly given meaning—sustains itself through the erasure of competing interpretations. Such an erasure, such a removal of the traces of production from the product, is the very work of reification, of sedimentation, the underlying goal of which would be obviating the very possibility that “things as they are” might be imagined otherwise.18
Theoretical writing, then, must always attempt to negate reification, must always work against the erasure of imaginative alterity. Through its restless de-sedimentations, theoretical writing attempts to help bring alternative intelligibilities into circulation, to help bring other ways of making sense, other ways of “making the present,” into play. At its productively baffling best, theoretical writing “never stops coming back” to challenge, resist, or disturb all the sedimentary operations that are required to reproduce “ordinary understanding,” to stabilize “given meaning,” to reify all human reality, and to normalize a world thus insulated from discomfort, protected from interrogation, shielded from interpretation, contestation, and change. This “normalization” is what theory fights. This fight is what theory does. And what theory does is why theory lives.
Coming to Terms
Critical Keywords encountered in the Introduction:
reification, essentialism, defamiliarization, humanism, metaphysics, semiotics, discourse, the subject, the political, materialism/materiality, sedimentation/de-sedimentation, phenomenology, deconstruction
Notes
1 Reification (from res, Latin for thing) is a Marxist term designating “the way that commodification reduces social relations, ideas, and even people to things” (Parker 2008: 193). Theoretical writing exposes and opposes this baleful reduction to commodified thing-iness and attempts, against heavy odds, to rescue itself and its objects of analysis from reification, to keep itself unreified. For some theoretical writers, this effort against reification actually constitutes “theory” as such. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, one of the founding documents of contemporary critical theory, Horkheimer and Adorno write that “Intellect’s true concern is a negation of reification. It must perish when it is solidified into a cultural asset and handed out for consumption purposes. The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make [sic] people smarter and more stupid at once” (1947/2002: xvii). More recently, in Valences of the Dialectic, Fredric Jameson writes “that theory is to be grasped as the perpetual and impossible attempt to dereify the language of thought, and to preempt all the systems and ideologies which inevitably result from the establishment of this or that fixed terminology.” And yet, because the working lexicon of any theory can coagulate into a “fixed terminology”—the word “reification” has, for example, a specific and precise, if not “fixedly” economic meaning in the language of Marxist thought—Jameson warns that any “theoretical process of undoing terminologies [can], by virtue of the elaboration of the terminology that very process requires, become . . . an ideology in its own turn and congeal into the very type of system it sought to undermine.” Thus, Jameson notes “the hopelessness of the nonetheless unavoidable aim of theoretical writing to escape the reifications [and] commodifications of the intellectual marketplace today” (2009: 9). As these two examples of “theoretical writing” qua writing against reification should suggest, to say that theory was ever “the latest thing in the humanities” or to characterize theory, as I have above, in the mercantile terms of “shelf-life” and “sell-by dates” is to leave it open to the charge of having failed to stay frosty against reification, as if theory had never been anything more than a steaming chunk of cultural capital, a hotly commodified intellectual amusement, rather like a computer game requiring “advanced” skills, but very little wisdom, a product making “consumers” (teachers and students) at once “smarter” (more technically savvy) and “stupider” (less perceptive about their actual conditions of existence, and hence more compliant with the dominant—reified and reifying—social order). As for theory’s hopeful project of successfully “dereifying the language of thought,” Jameson soberly suggests that “theory” cannot “expect to supplant the multitudinous forms of reified thinking and named and commodified thoughts on the intellectual marketplace today, but only to wage persistent and local guerilla warfare against their hegemony” (2009: 61).
2 Žižek explains that “a short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network—faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading?” This critical short-circuiting, writes Žižek, “is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion” and “what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality.” Žižek writes that “the aim of such an approach is . . . the inherent decentering of the interpreted text, which brings to light its ‘unthought,’ its disavowed presuppositions and consequences” (2006: ix).
3 In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha nicely specifies one of the key differences between “Man” and actual men by rewriting the phrase “almost the same, but not quite” as “almost the same, but not white” (1994: 89).
4 In Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, Difference, Diana Fuss describes essentialism as “belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the ‘whatness’ of a given entity.” For feminist theory, essentialism involves “the idea that men and women . . . are identified as such on the basis of transhistorical, eternal, immutable essences.” Theory is “anti-essentialist” in that it rejects “any attempts to naturalize human nature” (1989: xi).
5 For Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky, defamiliarization (ostranenie, or “making strange”) defines not theoretical writing but literary discourse as such. For Shklovsky, whose 1917 essay “Art as Technique” we’ll consider more thoroughly in Lesson Seven, literature “defamiliarizes” in that it “disrupts ordinary language and habitual modes of perception.” The term describes “literature’s ability to disrupt through its representation of reality the dominant ideas of society” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 76). For Shklovsky, “defamiliarization” pertains to “literature” and not “theory” per se, but contemporary theoretical writers often employ this word to argue that theoretical writing performs the most radical work of literature, as for example, when Jameson writes that the aim of theoretical writing is “to defamiliarize our ordinary habits of mind and to make us suddenly conscious not only of our own . . . obtuseness but also of the strangeness of reality as such” (2009: 50).
6 To make this difficult point more or less understandable, let’s borrow and alter some language from Jean-Luc Nancy and write that “If the strictest [and strangest] formulations of [theory] often inspire perplexity, annoyance, and refusal, it is because . . . these formulations . . . wish to make understood that they cannot be, as they are, understood by [our normal] understanding, but rather demand that [such] understanding relinquish itself.” (2002: 63) Nancy’s language will appear again in unaltered form in a footnote in Lesson Six.
7 Childers and Hentzi write that “in current critical debates humanism usually refers to an anthropocentric view of the world that asserts the existence of a universal human nature informing all actions and decisions.” (1995: 140) “Anti-humanist” theorists don’t hate humans, but question the existence of any such “universal human nature” or at least reject “Man” as this universal’s standard-bearer. Specifically, “feminists, black activist, postcolonial critics, and gay and lesbian critics have argued that the ‘man’ at the heart of humanism is not free of the limitations of limiting interests resulting from the specifics of a particular gender, class, race, or sexual orientation; on the contrary, this ‘man’ is male, white, middle-class, Anglo, and heterosexual. For these [anti-humanist] critics, the attempt to pass off such a limited viewpoint as universal is covertly, if not overtly, oppressive.” (1995: 141) Anti-humanist writing thus desires, as Derrida puts it, to “pass beyond man and humanism” (1966/1978: 292).
8 In Mythologies, Roland Barthes diagnoses what he calls “this disease of thinking in essences, which is at the bottom of every bourgeois mythology of man” (1957/1985: 75).
9 Metaphysics “usually refers to philosophical attempts to establish indisputable first principles as a foundation for all knowledge” and involves belief in “the existence of absolute entities” (Childer and Hentzi 1995: 186). Metaphysics also involves “belief in something unconditioned, i.e., something which would be true, absolutely and unconditionally, outside of all temporal and perspectival conditions” (Pearson and Large 2006: xxxi).
10 “Real-world people”—a category normally understood to exclude academics in general and “English majors” in particular—dislike having themselves “reduced” to mere words as well. Even students of literature, who supposedly “love language,” don’t always relish the thought that that’s the stuff all people in the real world are made of. But such radically “linguistic determinism” is pretty much the message of semiotics—the study of signs and signification—as it regards all selfhood or subjectivity or “personal identity” whatsoever. As for discourse, Wolfreys defines it as “the work of specific language practice: that is, language as it is used by and within various constituencies (e.g., the law, medicine, and the church) for purposes to do with power relations between people” (2004: 65). He also writes that “human subjectivity and identity itself is produced out of various discursive formations as a result of the subject’s entry into language always already shot through and informed by figurations and encryptions of power, politics, historical, cultural and ideological remainders organized through particular relationships and networks” (2004: 66).
11 Theoretical writers use the term subject to designate the human individual as constituted by linguistic, discursive, and sociocultural practices (which is to say, the human individual as such); in theory, humans or “subjects” exist only by virtue of being “subjected” to these practices—hence, as Louis Althusser puts it, “the ambiguity of the term subject” (1971/2001: 123). The term “subject” sometimes refers to “the rational, active mind of the human individual” and is “defined in opposition to the object—that which is other than consciousness” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 256). But what interests most theoretical writers is the weird permeability of the boundary between conscious and unconscious, subject and object, self and other, particularly, as we’ll see, in ambiguous moments of “writing or self-representation” when “the I is the self-present subject of the sentence as well as the subject ‘subjected’ to the symbolic order of the language in which [it] is writing” (Gagnier 1991: 9).
12 The political in the theoretical sense exceeds our “normal” (and hence impoverished) concepts of electoral politics, political parties, and so on. Rather, theoretical writers “understand political in its deeper meaning, as describing the whole of human relations in their real, social structure, in their power of making the world” (Barthes 1957/1985: 143).
13 For Jameson, “coming to terms with materialist language” involves the “attempt to dereify the language of thought” (2009: 9) and entails that “the traditional relationship between language and thought is to be reversed . . .: not language as an instrument or a vehicle for conceptuality, but, rather, the way in which the conditions and form of representation (speaking and writing) determine the concepts themselves, and constitute at one and the same time their conditions of possibility and also their limits, inflecting their shape and development” (2006: 365).
14 The words materialist and materiality deserve some definition here, but I am going to defer elaborating on them until the next chapter’s discussion of the sentence “The world must be made to mean”—a “materialist” assertion, if there ever was one. Here, let it suffice to say that one is well on one’s way to being “materialist” or “coming to terms with materialist language” when one attends to the production of meaning in a way that no longer assumes meaning or sense to have any “natural” or “supernatural” guarantee, when one begins to grasp the whole of human reality as an ongoing historical process of materialization or dynamic realization or actualization that originates in and depends upon nothing other than human productivity. Conceptualizing a world that must be made to mean, materialism “has to do with the humanization of that world and its de-naturalization, that is to say, with our recognition of that entire post-natural world [i.e., human reality itself] as the product of human praxis and production” (Jameson 2010: 108). Now, if this brief explanation of materialism doesn’t suffice, see Žižek’s long response to Adrian Johnston’s question “What does it mean to be a materialist in the early twenty-first century?” (Johnston 2009: 214), or consider the “antinatural” implications of the following from Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain?: “A reasonable materialism, in my view, would posit that the natural contradicts itself and that thought is the fruit of this contradiction” (2004/2008: 82).
15 A major caveat here: please note that the operative word in Cixous’ promising phrase about “writing as the possibility of change” is possibility, not “certainty” or “inevitability.” Nor can theoretical writing guarantee in advance that any “changes” wrought by your “coming to terms with materialist language” will necessarily be useful or progressive in any conventional political sense or that letting your common-sense perceptions be shattered and undermined will be “good for you” in any conventional moral sense. As we’ll be exploring, there are ethical as well as aesthetic and political dimensions to theory’s attempt to “de-reify the language of thought,” but the ethics of the attempt aren’t always transparent. And so, please recall this caveat—“change” is neither painless nor necessarily “for the common good”—anytime that I seem in this book to be crowing too loudly about the “transformative” potential of theory.
16 Phenomenology involves the analysis of “human consciousness as ‘lived experience’ ” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 227) and is usually associated with “the canonical three H’s of German philosophy” (Rabaté 2002: 47)—Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. The phenomenological term sedimentation appears in the later work of Husserl and, somewhat like “reification,” refers to a sort of spatial transformation of active perception into “settled” knowledge. David Carr writes that Husserl’s “geological metaphor suggests that which has sunk below the surface [of human consciousness as lived experience] but continues to support what is on the surface. Husserl availed himself of this metaphor in his later work precisely to elucidate what has the status of knowledge or belief rather than perception, but which recedes into a position comparable to a spatial horizon. It is that which figures in my awareness of the present, frames or sets it off without my having to think about it explicitly” (1987: 263).
17 Although I defer describing deconstruction until later pages, I will here share David Richter’s story that Derrida at one point wanted to replace the word deconstruction with “de-sedimentation”—although “that word never caught on” (827). In fact, early in Of Grammatology, Derrida uses the words interchangeably: he writes of an “enlarged and radicalized” writing that “no longer issues from a logos” (that is, from any consciously rational center of intention, either human or divine), and he writes that “this writing inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all significations that have their source in that of the logos. Particularly the signification of truth” (1967/1997: 10).
18 I’ve repeated the phrase “things as they are” a number of times now without giving proper attribution, so here, at last, are two—In Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, Simon Critchley writes that for Adorno, “the task of thinking is to keep open the slightest difference between things as they are and things as they might otherwise be” (1997: 22). Meanwhile, in the poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Wallace Stevens writes that “things as they are are changed on the blue guitar” (1937/1982: 165). I take “the blue guitar” to mean for Stevens the poetic imagination itself. But I also imagine that in some venues, performing the task of thinking, keeping open the possibility of change, theoretical writing can play a pretty mean blue guitar.