I am struck by the sense of irony—perhaps even injustice—out of which this volume arose. In his initial call for essays in 2005, Stephen Ross issued an eloquent apologia for theory as constitutive for modernist studies, puzzling at the “two-fold irony” that the ever-expanding boundaries of modernism evident in the new modernist studies have “come at the expense of a key area of inquiry that is both intimately linked to modernism and largely responsible for the rejuvenation of modernist studies: critical theory.” I couldn’t agree more with the foundational premise of this volume: that “critical theory” is fundamentally continuous with modernism and not a radical break from it, as the misleading but common terms “post-modern theory” or “postmodernism” suggest. But I want to probe the implications and possible limitations of Ross’s assertion in his call that “the massive rejuvenation of modernist studies was enabled precisely by theory’s confrontation with the predominant notions of the literary, canon formation, disciplinary formations, high and low culture, progress, civilization, and imperialism.”
Ross’s initial proposition that “critical theory” or “theory”—the first term slides imperceptibly into the second—is “largely responsible for” the rejuvenation of modernist studies is a big claim. It is softened somewhat in his impressive introduction, but nonetheless remains in his assertion that the “occlusion of theory” from the new modernist studies “ignores theory’s essential role in clearing the ground for a new approach to modernism”. What intellectual and political genealogies does this claim presume? Has “theory” performed the only “confrontation with the predominant notions of the literary, canon formation, disciplinary formations” that paved the way for the new understanding of modernism? What do we mean by “theory,” anyway? If “theory” is to get credit for dismantling the “old” and constituting the “new” modernist studies, then we ought to understand what “theory” means and presumably what it excludes: in short, what is “not theory” and does the opposition of theory/not theory have its own definitional politics based on the logic of inclusion/exclusion by which definition typically operates? The metonymic slide between “critical theory” and “theory” provides a starting point that links the diachronic and synchronic questions I have posed.
In a narrow sense, “critical theory” invokes Critical Theory, associated with the Frankfurt School. As Ross points out, Critical Theory develops alongside modernism, going back to the founding of the Institute for Social Research in 1929 and including the work of such preeminent theorists of modernity and modernism as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Anthologized in the influential Aesthetics and Politics (1977), Benjamin and Adorno in particular remain centers of exciting new work in modernist studies, which assumes Critical Theory to be both contemporaneous with modernism and a resonant framework for reading it.
In a broader sense, however, “critical theory” has a less certain meaning. Sometimes, it refers to the philosophical and psychoanalytic theories of signification and the symbolic order associated with varieties of poststructuralism emanating from France since the 1960s. At other times, “critical theory” includes any theory that is critical of the social order, as James Bohman notes: “any philosophical approach with similar practical aims [as Frankfurt School Critical Theory] could be called a ‘critical theory,’ including feminism, critical race theory, and some forms of post-colonial criticism” (Bohman 2005). 1
While Critical Theory is widely understood as part of modernism, “critical theory” or just “theory” often is not. The slippage from “critical theory” to “theory” as well as the definitional boundaries of “theory” comes into play here. Does “critical theory” or “theory” refer to “high theory,” implying an analogy with “high modernism,” a phrase that itself slips between avant-garde modernism and “establishment” modernism? If so, theory invokes poststructuralism, most centrally of the French variety. This theory continues early twentieth-century modernism into other discursive systems: philosophical, linguistic, historical/political.
In the US academy, poststructuralism had its heyday in the 1980s, its proponents often occupying positions of privilege and prestige even as their work was resisted, mocked, and barely understood by those steeped in the complex oeuvre of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Barthes, Cixous, Irigaray, Deleuze and Guattari, and the relevant philosophical traditions. During the 1980s, modernist scholars often turned to poststructuralism for frameworks, concepts, and strategies for reading modernists from earlier in the century that anticipated later poststructuralist thought. An uncanny symbiosis between figures like Joyce and Derrida, Woolf and Kristeva, Stein and Barthes, Barnes and Foucault, H. D. and Irigaray pervaded many studies of modernism (including my own). High modernism and high theory stepped out together like beautifully paired, high-strutting steeds pulling the carriage of criticism, seemingly leaving the clodhopping methods of literary history, author studies, archival studies, and so forth behind.
Ross’s apologia suggests that the newly expansive modernist studies has forgotten the role that poststructuralism played in the critique of knowledge that reinvented scholarship, particularly in the humanities and the American academy. For some, poststructuralism has become a toolbox of reading strategies to be drawn upon whenever a deconstructive hammer or a Lacanian screwdriver seems handy. Such fragmentary uses ignore the varied philosophical frameworks of poststructuralism, reducing a coherent body of theory into partial and selective strategies that can wrench the components out of their larger frameworks, displacing them into other, possibly incompatible frameworks. To protest such redeployment of poststructuralism sounds perfectly reasonable, and yet I fear that it is sometimes based on a desire that ought to be (but isn’t in practice) incompatible with poststructuralist theory: namely, the desire to control and keep “pure” the subsequent uses of theory, to keep theory within the parameters of what Francois Roustang called “dire mastery” in his discussion of Lacan and Lacanians. Rather than genealogies of discipleship, I prefer to track the circulation, transplantation, adaptation, and indigenization of theory as it moves from one location to another. I remain much influenced by Edward Said’s “Traveling Theory” (1983) and “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” (1994), which emphasize the need to understand how theories change as they are used in different places and for different purposes. As Said reflects, the transplanted theory often becomes more transgressive and powerful, not diluted, in its new environs.
Translating “high theory” into other critical languages, however, is not my only concern with this volume’s premises about the relation of theory to modernism. I have two others: first, the genealogy of critique that has enabled the new modernist studies; and second, the meaning of theory itself in the context of contemporary literary studies in general, and modernist studies in particular. Rather than see critical or poststructuralist theory as a single stream of ideas solely responsible for opening up the modernist canon, I regard it as one among many theoretical streams that ran parallel to each other, sometimes confronted each other, and eventually joined into a sea-change in modernist studies. Even before the theory of the Frankfurt School or of French poststructuralism had much impact on modernist studies in the United States, the rise in the 1970s of feminist literary theory, lesbian/gay theory, race studies, and multicultural and class theory blew open the established canons of literary studies in general. The hegemony of French “high theory” in the United States follows, not precedes, the radical critique of prevailing notions of the literary and the canon, and of the methodologies and institutions of literary studies. The recoveries of many modernist women writers in the 1970s as well as new attention to women’s role in modernist cultural production represented the ground of critique that opened modernist studies to ideas from France in the 1980s. Similarly, the rise of African-American Studies in the 1970s and its spread into the multiculturalisms of the 1980s enabled consideration of movements like the Harlem Renaissance as part of modernism. Crediting “theory” as sole enabler of the new modernist studies forgets a history of critique rooted in the political movements of the 1960s—Civil Rights, feminist, anti-war, gay/lesbian, and so forth. No doubt Marxism, influential in the Frankfurt School, also played a role in the movements of the 1960s and their aftermath. But the Frankfurt School itself is not the origin of radical critique in the US; rather, it is one of the streams of critique that developed in that particular moment. As continental theory transplanted into the US academy, its deconstructions of systems of signification found a strong foothold in many disciplines and interdisciplines, in part because earlier theories and movements had challenged the prevailing objectivist and exclusivist epistemologies that had ignored, marginalized, or otherwise ideologically represented whole populations, cultures, and issues. Lumping these earlier politically based theories with “critical theory” swallows up what were distinctive theoretical strands under a general rubric that still frequently signifies poststructuralist or Frankfurt School theory.
The case of postcolonial studies is somewhat different, and here I see the histories of Critical Theory and poststructuralism much more entangled with the rise of postcolonial studies, now one of the most exciting areas in the new modernist studies. As translator of Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak symptomatizes how postcolonial theory is tied to the intellectual traditions of both the Frankfurt School and poststructuralist theory. Even in this case, though, I would suggest not that theory enabled postcolonial studies, but that they enabled each other.
My second concern is to resist the metonymic slide from critical or poststructuralist theory to theory itself. During what Wallace Martin has called “the epoch of theory” in the 1980s, the sentence “I do theory” commonly designated a specialization whereby self-definition as a literary theorist meant not an expertise in theory in general, but rather knowledge of specific French theories. “Doing theory” was typically ahistorical and decontextualizing in approach. But the production and use of this theory has a geohistory (an intersecting space and time) however much it might be suppressed. In “Theory Today,” Jacques Lezra provocatively suggested that “the era of ‘high theory’” in the US, “which runs roughly from 1967 to 1988,” represents the anti-nationalist/internationalist response of a generation of intellectuals “in the US literary scene” who resisted the logic of the Cold War by looking “to a post-national Europe for their intellectual models” (Lezra 2006:2). Today, Lezra points out, the conditions that produced the “heyday of ‘high theory’” have dissipated; instead, the twenty-first century is producing new kinds of theory, with a “thematic focus on matters of ethnicity, transculturation, globalization” (Lezra 2006:2). He asks us to remember that the word “theory” shifted in meaning in the late sixteenth century from signifying “spectacle” or “a form of contemplation” to denoting, “as the OED has it, a ‘systematic statement of rules or principles to be followed’” (Lezra 2006:2).
We need to think more broadly about the meaning of “theory,” refusing to equate one set of theories with the act of theorizing itself. In my view, “theory” signifies a mode of thought, a synchronic form of cognition that reaches for the generalizable rather than the particular. It is a system of thought that has explanatory power for many particularities located in different times and spaces. Not a “systematic statement of rules or principles,” theory is also not inherently “critical”—it can be hegemonic as well as oppositional (or some combination thereof), and it can serve radically different politics. It is the opposite of what Clifford Geertz has called the “thick description” of “local knowledge,” a methodology that seeks out particularity and resists the comparative or generalizable. Theory is transdisciplinary, though it is often articulated in and through particular disciplines. It resists the tendency of local knowledge to claim exceptionalism or uniqueness. Often containing the traces of its disciplinary production, theory takes many forms: philosophical, paradigmatic, modeling, aphoristic, narrative, figural, prophetic, etc.2 As much as it might invite the transparent application of its systematic mode of knowing, it too has a materiality and form that opens to close reading for its internal contradictions, absences, multiplicities, and vast potentialities. Just as local knowledge has its limitations, theory too has its excesses: totalization, homogenization, decontextualization, deterritorialization, dehistoricization. Both modes of knowing—theorization and localization—have limitations; combined, each counters the excesses of the other. Neither exists very effectively without the other.
Understanding “theory” in this broader sense fosters a different approach to the entanglements of theory and modernist studies. It prevents the slippage from “theory” to “critical theory” to “poststructuralist” or Continental theory that is often unacknowledged. Most importantly it allows us to see the widespread use in the new modernist studies of what is often called “cultural theory.” Cultural theory exists alongside the continuing resonances of critical and poststructural theory. Lezra’s observation that the current emphasis in literary studies is “a focus on matters of ethnicity, transculturation, globalization” is both astute and slightly misleading. On the one hand, he notes the growing importance of cultural theory in literary studies; on the other hand, he does not name it as such, calling it instead a “thematic focus.” The phenomenon he addresses reflects the shift from one kind of theoretical dominance to another. Cultural theory has in many ways supplanted poststructuralism as the main theoretical discourse to which many literary scholars turn for interdisciplinary and geohistorical engagements.
This shift has been a long time coming, at least in the United States. In a provisional and non-linear genealogy, the roots of the rise of cultural theory go back to the historical conditions Lezra alluded to, and to the confluence of several developments in literary studies: globalizing literary studies; interdisciplinarity (especially uses of anthropology, geography, media and popular culture studies, sociology, and science); the impact of fields like women’s studies, race and ethnic studies, gay/lesbian/bisexual and queer studies, postcolonial, diasporic, and transnational studies, and disability studies; the spread of New Historicism from Early Modern Studies; and British Cultural Studies and its transatlantic fusion with New Historicism in the 1990s and the critical interdisciplines named above.3
The interest in “ethnicity, transculturation, globalization” that Lezra mentions engages with, uses, and sometimes produces cultural theory in many ways. Interestingly, the new dominance of cultural theory has not meant the complete abandonment of French theory. First, some poststructuralists still writing by the twenty-first century—Derrida and Cixous, for example—themselves became engaged with cultural theory, especially issues of nation, transculturalism, and transnationalism. Second, some of the theorists allied with poststructuralism during its heyday have been bridge figures to the present, continuing to be influential because their work substantively engaged geohistorically with questions of culture—preeminently, Foucault, Althusser, and Deleuze and Guattari. Third, other theorists whose work has been a form of cultural theory from the beginning—such as Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, and Henri Lefebvre—have become at least as important, if not more so, as major sources of theory used widely in literary studies, including modernist studies. Their concepts of the habitus and the cultural field of production, circulation, and consumption (Bourdieu), culture as everyday practice (Certeau), and social spatiality (Lefebvre), for example, pervade current modernist studies. In a sense, Critical Theory—particularly that of Benjamin and Adorno—is now read through the lens of cultural theory as a form of cultural theory itself. The time is ripe, perhaps, to revisit both Critical Theory and poststructuralism either as particular forms of cultural theory or for their contributions to cultural theory.
It’s one thing to assert that cultural theory is currently ascendant in literary studies. It is another to define what cultural theory is and how it might differ from other forms of theory such as social theory, critical theory, and poststructuralist theory. The borders between different kinds of theory are extremely porous, producing endless hybrid combinations, and the work of individual theorists often self-consciously blends disparate theoretical traditions. Distinctive emphases in different kinds of theory do exist, however, and it is a mistake to ignore the tendencies toward slippage whereby one kind of theory comes to stand for theory itself. Sound bites for different theory might look something like this: poststructuralist theory examines the significance of language and signifying systems in the symbolic order; critical theory offers political critique of ideology and political orders; social theory focuses on societal formations, stratifications, and distributions of power; feminist, race, and sexual theory address identity formations, axes of difference, and intersectionality; and cultural theory generalizes about cultural products and practices. Such shorthands, while useful, also demonstrate how impossible it is to maintain pure distinctions among types of theory. How, for example, can cultural theory address cultural products and practices without looking at signifying systems or social stratifications? Or ideology, race, and gender? As Rita Felski writes, “To study culture is to study everything that signifies … The structure of social life cannot be separated from layerings of symbolic meaning in which they are embedded” (Felski 2000:56). The blend of cultural, social, and linguistic theories is everywhere evident. Nonetheless, each type of theory has a distinctive emphasis and contribution.
A second, and arguably more important, problem in defining cultural theory is the instability of the term “culture” itself. The meaning of “culture” is in flux and often interrogated in cultural theory itself. Cultural theory has all the heterogeneity of the competing concepts of “culture.” Moreover, cultural theory often carries the marks of the disciplines out of which the theorists predominantly work. “Culture” for anthropologists and literary scholars signifies different objects and different methodologies of study. Increasingly, however, cultural theory is transdisciplinary, drawing on and often combining disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Reflecting late twentieth-century globalism, spatial modes of theorization are especially pervasive. Cultural theory abounds in the rhetoric of location, landscape, network, conjuncture, linkage, intersection, mobility, displacement, and dislocation.
Cultural theory forms particularly at the intersection of culture with a capital “C” and culture with a little “c”—that is, culture as aesthetic productions of “high culture” and culture as the ethnos, the normative values, narratives, rituals, and practices of everyday life. The first grows out of the nineteenth-century meaning of culture as “the best which has been thought and said in the world” (Arnold 1981:6). The second also grows out of nineteenth-century thought in the founding of anthropology: “Culture, or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor cited in Stocking 1982:73). As Stuart Hall points out, these early and competing notions of culture have evolved considerably (Hall 1997:2). Cultural theory in particular works across the supposed divide between “high” and “low” culture, examining popular culture, mass culture, and “little” traditions alongside the more prestigious forms of aesthetic production. It also works in the borderlands between culture as product and culture as a “set of practices” (Hall 1997:2). Like poststructuralism, cultural theory often addresses signifying systems and codes as constitutive of culture; like social and critical theory, cultural theory often examines culture in the context of power relations, oppression, and forms of collusion, subversion, and resistance.
As Felski points out, the new import of cultural theory for modernist studies is linked to revisiting the issue of modernity: “Modernity is back with a vengeance. People are reflecting anew on the protean meanings of the modern, on its ambiguous legacies and current realities” (Felski 2000:55). This attention to the “modern” blends the multiple meanings of “culture” in modernist studies, often bringing together the aesthetic achievements of “high modernism” and the cultural practices of everyday life, of popular and mass culture, of material culture, and of the “little traditions” of marginalized peoples. The theoretical interest in cultural practices instead of just cultural products has also brought new approaches to the study of “high culture,” ones that assume the aesthetic object to be part of the cultural field or sphere (to invoke Bourdieu and Camboni) and thus a representational system involving both production and reception. Additionally, the new modernist studies has moved beyond the culture capitals of a few great European and American cities to a newly global and transnational scale, taking up the networks and cultural flows between the traditional centers of modernism and the colonies and former colonies; treating other parts of the world as centers of modernity and aesthetic production in their own right; and exploring the interrelationship of non-Western modernities and modernisms with one another. Comparative modernism has become increasingly global in perspective, challenging the older Eurocentric models.
Cultural theory pervades the new modernist studies, not to the exclusion of poststructuralist and critical theory, but often alongside them. A snapshot of selected work I first heard at Modernist Studies Association conferences since 1999 demonstrates the centrality and scope of cultural theory. Victoria Rosner’s Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, winner of the 2006 MSA Prize, examines the relation between psychic life and private life in British modernism through the lens of interior design and spatiality. Felski’s “New Cultural Theories of Modernity” issues an open call to modernist studies to use the new cultural theory of modernity. Mark Wollaeger’s “Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race” blends anthropology, material culture, and postcolonial studies in a reading of Woolf’s The Voyage Out centered on ethnographic postcards sent home by travelers in the colonies. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s Geomodernism: Race, Modernism, Modernity examines modernities and modernisms centered outside the West, defined in and through colonial relations. Giovanna Covi’s Modernist Women Race Nation: Networking Women 1890–1950, Circum-Atlantic Connections uses theories of the cultural sphere, nation, race, and gender to examine the production and reception of women’s transnational modernism. Modernism/Modernity’s 2006 special issue of Modernism and Transnationalism, edited by Cassandra Laity, is bookended with essays by postcolonial cultural theorists, Simon Gikandi and Sonita Sarker. However much this work draws on poststructuralist or critical theory, it is unthinkable without substantial use of cultural theory.
In spite of my insistence on the distinctiveness and significance of cultural theory for modernist studies, I would like to end with a plea for the deprivileging of any one kind of theory—whether poststructuralist, critical, or cultural—in modernist studies. We can note special affinities between modernism and different kinds of theories—for example, the way that the radical ruptures of representational poetics and practices that underlay early twentieth-century Anglo-American and European modernisms are linked to later poststructuralist theories of language; the equally radical shatterings of gender and racial barriers in the modernisms of the New Woman and the New Negro are linked to the later feminist and race theory of the post-1970 revolutions of knowledge. But we should avoid letting any one kind of theory stand in for the act of theorization itself or for the plurality of theoretical approaches, each one of which has vital and distinctive contributions to make to understanding the play between modernism and theory.
1 See also Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today (2006) and The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory (Maples and Wake 2006), where “critical theory” incorporates any theory critical of hegemony.
2 On theory in the form of narrative, metaphor, or parable, see, e.g., Christian (1990:38) and Nfah-Abbenyi (1997:20).
3 For the differences between British and American Cultural Studies, see for example During (1999) and Grossberg et al. (1992).
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