The Two Are Not One

[x-posted from the Valve ]

In “The End of the Poststructuralist Era,” from Follies of the Wise, Frederick Crews charts the hasty marriage and slow estrangement of poststructuralist thought and New Left activism.  His argument, and its implications, may surprise you.

You see, the Yale School of deconstruction’s “manifest aim was ... to bring a spirit of erudite whimsy into the discussion of familiar [canonical] books, which would be rendered only more endearing by the discovery that their meanings were more multitudinous and undecidable than anyone had yet surmised” (308).  Too true, too true. 

Only, why would the discovery of even “more multitudinous and undecidable” dimensions to canonical literature open up the canon to previously marginalized voices?  Wouldn’t deconstruction have the opposite effect?  Hillis, speaking here in his 1986 presidential address, certainly thought so:

As everyone knows, literary study in the past few years has undergone a sudden, almost universal turn away from theory in the ordinary sense of an orientation toward language as such and has made a corresponding turn toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions. (283)

Color me confused.  Here I thought theory necessarily entailed the commitments it so recently acquired.  Here I thought older modes of criticism possessed the retrograde politics.  Here I thought a lot of things a little historical perspective shattered.  Why?  Because the explanations were conceptual. 

Because they’re always conceptual. 

Poststructuralist thought always allies itself with a progressive politics, and poststructuralist thinkers always fold the latter into the former.  The result?  Opposition to poststructuralist thought necessarily entails an opposition to the progressiveness of its immanent politics.  Now I can complain that those politics aren’t immanent, that no textual orientation contains an immanent politics, but I will be shouted down by those who experience as natural their political and theoretical commitments, who cannot disentangle them because, well, because no one can offer a convincing reason that they should.

For the better part of two decades, literary critics have used a poststructuralist theoretical approach to generate a body of progressive thought, so of course the two appear inseparable.  Factor in the overwhelming number of conservative critics who fancy themselves poststructuralists, then think about it:

If everyone who does what they do shares the same politics, and everyone who doesn’t, doesn’t, why would they question a connection that feels so natural to them?  They have no reason to. 

So they haven’t.  I have, but from the wrong direction.  I started in the ‘70s moving forward, from the moment when the former radicals gained purchase in the discipline.  All this time, I should have been looking at it from the other direction, from the ‘80s moving backwards.  To point out, as Hillis does above, that “theory in the ordinary sense” existed independently of the commitments it eventually acquired.

Conceptual arguments be damned, I say, I have history.  The two are not one, not naturally.  They may be one of this lot, but more than likely not.  Just a simple couple whose marriage, while productive, is neither permanent nor necessary.

Comments

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

[This comment also x-posted on the Valve]

This being, as I hope is obvious, a criticism of neither, only of the connection frequently made between them and the implications thereof.

[Nate]

I'm going to have to read that book. The idea that any body of thought at all secures its own radicality is a dumb, and sometimes dangerous, error. I went to a conference once, held by the Radical Philosophy Association. It was a good time. Lots of other commies who really like books, and many similar books. But it's really easy to deceive oneself, as if "I have far left beliefs" means "what I do is of or for or a contribution to the far left". The conference would have been better called "Radicals Who Make Excessive Detours Through Philosophy", that would have been more honest and could have helpd some folk accomplish the working through they were engaged in. So yeah, post-structural lit crit as radical? And to be blunt, campus politics in general? I mean ... really, come on. Not to say it's without value, but the pose of being really far left, on the side of the angels and all that. A bit self-serving, you know?