This is an updated version—in the sense that I've elaborated some points and abridged others—of an email I wrote yesterday. Writing it clarified some issues for me and my interlocutor, so I thought I'd post another version up here tonight. I've decided to elide the names of those persons who don't have a significant web-presence, since I don't have their permission to write about their lives and work.
There's something about modernist literature which lends itself to and/or is consonant with continental philosophy. Joyce, Proust, Woolf, &c. attract people who study Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, &c. The attraction is some combination of the characteristics of the text and the characteristics of the minds attracted to such texts, but whatever the explanation, the effect is palpable. There's certainly a relationship between continental philosophy and European modernism, as evidenced by the fact that almost everyone who works on the latter does so through the former. I'm being careful here to specify "continental philosophy" instead of Theory, since it's "continental philosophy" and not Theory which interests literary modernists. The reason?
Modernism starts, depending on who you ask, with the European-inflected thought of William James on Gertrude Stein; or with Bergson's influence on Woolf and Joyce; or with any number of French intellectuals on Joyce, Beckett, and Pound; &c. There's a kind of historicist heart to the modernist's embrace of continental philosophy, since it's often essential to understanding the formal properties of the works being studied or the works which have influenced them.
So, as an undergraduate I studied with M.P., a Joycean who split time between Santa Cruz and Paris in the '70s. He attended Lacan's seminars, worked with Derrida, and wrote a dissertation on Joyce under the direction of Fredric Jameson and Hayden White. (In graduate school, he, T.B.—now a notorious historicist—and M.B.W.—now just notorious—were close friends.) M.P. fancied himself a continental philosopher of sorts, but when he hit the market, he was considered a "theorist" because he was a continental philosopher of sorts who worked in an English department.
My graduate school agenda, hatched with M.P. during many a long office hour, was to continue to massage my philosophically-inclined Joycean interests by coming to Irvine, where I could work with Derrida (who got a backchannel letter from M.P. vouching for me, a copy of which was sent to N.M., a prominent Wake scholar. To round out my undergraduate education, I sought out a guy in the French department named John Protevi. (You may know him as a frequent commenter on Michael's blog.) He's the editor of the Yale University Press's Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, and his personal interests are in Foucault and all things Deleuzoguattarian. He and I clicked, so I started reading Foucault and many things Deleuzoguattarian, learning about the conflicts internal to the continental tradition. So my graduate project, such that it was, entailed me coming to Irvine and continuing this course of study.
When I got here, however, I discovered what I still take to be the central difference between Theory and continental philosophy: intellectual seriousness. In seminars I wasn't learning about the conflicts internal to the continental tradition; in fact, I wasn't learning about conflicts at all. I was learning that playing fast and loose with ideas in an endless game of oneupsmanship was encouraged and rewarded. That creativity was valued above consistency, and that a novel idea, no matter how nonsensical, was the only kind worth having. Work through the complexities of someone's thought? Pish-posh. You take a little something from it which helps "further" some theoretical project and you slap it in there. The point, I took it, was to combine superficial knowledge from a hoard of incompatible philosophies in order to express your own personal opinion about how the world works:
I think this demands a little repessiveness, so I'll mine Lacan for something suitable, then I'll duct-tape it to this Butlerian-Hegelian-phenomenological model of postcolonial thought I've concocted and turn it in. And, of course, if anyone says anything critical of my project, I'll call them anti-theoretical or, better yet, anti-intellectual.
In short, there's something tremendously intellectually dishonest, arrogant and, to be frank, careerist about Theory in English departments. The typical bullshit session consists of constructing gigantic theoretical edifices on the slightest of evidence for the sheer amusement. Some "interesting" readings are done and everyone goes home happy but utterly unedified. Such is the sort of nonsense which I associate with Theory.
Why don't I "do theory" anymore? Because I didn't want to take classes with such fundamentally unsound but unreasonably vocal thinkers. I bounced around, eventually took a class with the aforementioned T.B., who was trained to be an historicist in Germany, and belongs to a tradition of German philosophical historicism which I find suitably serious; then I took another, this one with S.M., a student of M.B.W., and trained as an historicist closer to T.B.'s mold than that of Stephen Greenblatt's.
In a way, then, I'm back in with the same coterie of thinkers I started with: continentally-trained philosophical-types. I admit the degree of their connectedness boggles the mind: my undergraduate advisor was close friends with one member of my committee and with the guy who trained my chair . . . and I learned this all after the fact. My interlocutor noted that his impression of the English department as his university doesn't correspond with mine of mine. (In the interests of full disclosure: my department doesn't look much at all like that anymore. Things have changed, for the infinitely better, since I've arrived at Irvine. The intellectual culture is far more responsible than it once was, and I can't tell you how happy that much that makes me wish I had taken a few years off before going to graduate school.)
"When I got here, however, I discovered what I still take to be the central difference between Theory and continental philosophy: intellectual seriousness."
Hmm. That might have been an interesting addition somewhere around this part of a very short thread that recently took place on another blog. Perhaps we should continue the discussion here?
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Friday, 19 May 2006 at 08:43 PM
Institutional culture can do strange things to your sense of disciplinary identity - and also to practical things such as what you read. I received a really good grounding in German social theory and philosophy at my previous university, and as much grounding as I desired in the French "Continental" philosophy you mention here. I have to admit that I was turned off by most French-inspired theory, with the exception of some Foucault - perhaps I haven't read the right works, or read them closely enough, but works in this tradition always seemed to be saying things I thought were obvious, but dressing these obvious statements in a vocabulary that claimed to have found something profound...
With all this emphasis on theory, though, reading actual *philosophy* was discouraged in my department - particularly anything analytic. So my view of what had been happening in other philsophical traditions was heavily shaped by the opinions of folks who, I now know, themselves probably hadn't read any since the 1950s... Engagement with certain scientific disciplines was also discouraged, based on a disturbingly tenuous notion of what had been firmly empirically established by the social sciences.
I came to my current position thinking of myself as a social theorist, and found that everyone was reading my work and calling me a philosopher (mind you, this is only because my university has no proper philosophers around...). I kept having twinges because I really only knew a small slice of philosophy, and so I started reading more widely - only to realise how many other intellectual traditions had made analogous shifts to the traditions with which I was more familiar - and as a result often offered interesting and useful routes into problems that stymied my core tradition...
So I also feel that I've wasted a bit of time - I really should have been reading, and processing, so many approaches, so much earlier. For me, personally, though, this sense of wasted time tends to be overshadowed by my relief in now working in a place that encourages me to roam a bit, intellectually - that doesn't have such a strong demand for intellectual loyalty to a particular discipline or tradition... In a weird way, this freedom also makes it possible to be more intellectually serious - to follow an empirical and theoretical puzzle where it leads, rather than having to cut though short at that point on the theoretical map where, purportedly, "here there be tygers"...
Posted by: N. Pepperell | Friday, 19 May 2006 at 09:31 PM
This is what I mean by your not being careerist enough.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Friday, 19 May 2006 at 09:35 PM
The thing that sort of drops out here, Scott, is the value of the source works themselves. Sure, there are bad teachers of theory. There are bad historicists too. But this post makes it sound like your transformation was motivated mostly by a professional decision to drop one set of advisors/protectors and affiliate yourself with another set.
In other words, your move seems a bit overdetermined. What if you had fallen in initially with poor historicists and there was a party of good theorists over across the bar, giving you the eye?
I've had very good teachers, see, of a theoretical stripe. Responsible, lucid - one of them, as we've discussed, is at yr instution... There's no way you could accuse him of a lack of "intellectual seriousness" - and he's certainly not big voice / no thought. And while your mini-intellectual-bio follows the format "Prof. X ran a bad seminar, so I took up with Prof. Y," mine runs something like this: "I needed to work through problem X, and found text Y to be helpful. When problem X led me to problem Z, text A slid to the front of my bookshelf."
So, like, Benjamin stays important to me because of the issues that I'm working on. Not because of the quality of the people who read, teach, and write about him.
Posted by: CR | Friday, 19 May 2006 at 09:49 PM
Aren't you supposed to be on a blog break because you're travelling?
At any rate, your post consoles me--for a couple of years I was wondering if I did the wrong thing going to law school instead of a critical theory emphasis grad program in English lit--like the one you thought you would do. Your post consoles me for two reasons: 1) I was not smart enough to start anew with critical theory in grad school. One quarter of it does not a theorist make. If you started all the way back as a Derrida admiring undergrad, what the hell was I thinking? (and to be honest, I didn't know much about the distinction between continental philosophy other traditions); and 2) I might have been annoyed by, or turned into one of those annoying people who drove you out of your theory classes.
But in the end, I got into the same trap at law school. It's strange being considered a critical race theorist because I don't theorize about race much anymore, and have always felt somewhat dishonest about it. As if my modicum of knowledge about theory really made me so much abler to interrogate how the law reifies and reproduces racial hegemony. It felt weird, all those discussions about Althusserian signs and signifiers of race in an opinion--as if that really mattered when at the end of the day there are real things you can do on behalf of the plaintiff. Maybe that's why I do the Commerce Clause now!
Posted by: Belle Lettre | Saturday, 20 May 2006 at 02:46 AM
Heck, why not start with the influence of Kant on Kleist?
Posted by: Ray Davis | Saturday, 20 May 2006 at 04:07 PM
"You take a little something from it which helps "further" some theoretical project and you slap it in there."
This is coming from an outsiders perspective but I think that the word "deployment" as it is used in Theory is the key to understanding Theory. The role of the word and concept of “deployment” in Theory is the source of complaints about the higher eclecticism, the star system, ( ironically) narrowness, dogmatism and even perhaps the funny comparisons to medieval theology that pop up every so often. A good way to start assessing these claims would be to start assessing this word and concept.
Posted by: T. Scrivener | Saturday, 20 May 2006 at 06:10 PM
After an undergrad career of reading the meanderings of various French intellects, I've found Heidegger very useful for the more theoretical elements my dissertation (on early medieval Irish literature, but bear with me).
An excellent short intro, 'Heidegger and Literature' by Timothy Clark (Routledge) really helped dig me out of something like the kind of theory/lit hole you mentioned above - it's well worth a look.
Posted by: Brendan | Wednesday, 24 May 2006 at 08:35 AM
Scott, I really appreciate this post. I can relate. I'm in the process of figuring out how to tie off a few loose end problems and to try and turn toward work that feels more responsible and rigorous. It's really hard, particularly when trying to do so in a way that's diplomatic and in good faith.
best,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Wednesday, 31 May 2006 at 06:37 PM