Acephalous

How not to use Theory's Empire

Scanning through the critical literature on Kafka—the dissertation finished, I'm free to pursue old ideas—I run into an essay which uses Theory's Empire in the very manner the anthology's critics assumed everyone would.  I will, however, Google-proof my exasperation by replacing all mentions of Derrida and things Derridean with cognates of the word carrot.  The essay begins:

The 2005 volume includes major reassessments of poststructuralist theory, notably [The Carrot's] . . . . The emphasis on "undecidability" in Kafka can be viewed as symptomatic of the influence of [Carrot] Theory embraced by the American literary academy in the 1970s and 1980s . . . . But [lowercase-c carrot's] skeptical effect undermined the certitude that Kafka was a politically important novelist. For its detractors, the [carrotist] view that there is "nothing outside of the text" ignores that texts like Kafka's have shaped human lives and human history.

Reductive enough for you?  No?  How about this?

Wellek, who helped to introduce [Carrot] theory to American literature departments, now asserts that [carrots] have destroyed literary studies, while Frederick Crews argues that "[the Carrot's] judgment that 'there is nothing outside the text' automatically precludes recourse to evidence." In Crews's view, "both [the Carrot] and his myriad followers think nothing of appropriating and denaturing propositions from systems of thought whose premises they have already rejected." Thomas Nagel goes further in condemning "post-modern relativism" as a "quick fix" which puts reason to sleep. In Theory's Empire, [the Carrot]'s language is described as a "maze," a "prison house of language," a "limbo of combined attention and nonassertion."

These assessments appeal to raw authority.  Crews and Nagel hate on [the Carrot] and rightly so.  Why?  Because [the Carrot's] language is as empty and invidious as that of Kafka's bureaucrats:

[T]o what degree do [the Carrot's] rhetorical devices and ingenious language games resemble the language of the Courtiers who torture Joseph K.?

Care to guess what conclusion the author draws?  I take comfort in the thought that everyone will admit this is an awful appropriation of the thought forwarded in Theory's Empire—that it is to academic argument what posts on Kos are to nuanced political thought—but remember that this sort of anti-intellectual response is exactly what the anthology's detractors warned would follow if it ever gained traction.  While I think this falls under "the abuses" instead of "the uses" of the collection, I still feel the queasy creep of wrongness starting to settle in . . . .

On "The Kind of Critical, Obliquely Ontological Investigation of Some Sort of Self"

[cross-posted to The Valve]

Two long posts, both concerning theory, both beginning with a quotation of a previous discussion.  Serendipity?  The constitutional inability to resist having the last word?  Doesn’t matter.  Also unimportant: the experiment I concocted whereby I would post this here and ask Mark to post it on Long Sunday to see whether the two crowds would treat the material differently in some meaningful way.  But I digress.  (Despite not even having started yet.) Ahem: I accused Mark Kaplan of reading Foucault’s account of historical interest naively.  I quoted this bit as proof:

So, for example, the sexual practices of ancient Greece – were these not, for Foucault, partly a way of thinking his way outside modern notions of ‘sexuality’ and the historically ingrained ‘regime’ supporting them.

And followed with this assessment:

I think Mark’s severely underestimating Foucault’s congenital pessimism, both about historical change and, more importantly, the idea that we can understand the discourses which saturate our lives in the moment that we live them.

He responded, quite rightly, that I glossed over Foucault’s notion of “the critical ontology of the self,” the practice he identifies with Kant’s Aufklärung, which my Oxford Duden German Dictionary tells me means something along the lines of “clearing up,” “solution,” “elucidation,” “explanation,” “a reconnaissance plane” or “the Enlightentment.” Some of these things are not like the others.  I’ve wondered why the English translation of the essay—"What is Enlightenment?"—failed to capture the reference there both in Kant’s German ("Was ist Aufklärung?") and Foucault’s French ("Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?"). Might this slight tick in the English be indicative of some abstractive impulse at the heart of Anglo-American Theory?  (Yes, I capitalized it, but for reasons which will eventually become apparent.) I’m not too inclined (yet) to attribute such a thing to American Theory because Kant’s work, as well as Foucault’s gloss of it, speaks directly to the problem of philosophical thought reflecting on the present moment:

"I Got a Good Mind to Join a Club and Beat You over the Head with It"

More positive press for the Valve (and, I assume, its contributors) from Henry Farrell in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education:

The recent debate on the Theory's Empire anthology, organized by the Valve, demonstrates how blogospheric argument can work. Theory's Empire is an ambitious volume, which seeks to provide a dissident's version of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism and to argue against the perceived pre-eminence of "theory" in literary criticism. The book is now beginning to attract attention from the mainstream media and will probably be the subject of symposia and debates over the next couple of years. A semi-organized symposium on the Valve, the blog of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, allowed a wide-ranging and active debate on the book within several weeks of its publication. The debate included responses from authors of pieces in Theory's Empire, as well as from prominent academics like John McGowan (an editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism) and Michael Bérubé, both of whom have successful blogs. But it also included, on an equal footing, responses from nonspecialists, like the Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong, and from nonacademic bloggers with an interest in the topic, like Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly. The result: an unusually high level of intelligent discussion around a topic more usually associated with stale pro- and anti-theory polemics. As McGowan describes it, "This is not yet another round in the culture and theory wars. ... Is it possible that academics interested in such questions have won their way through to a place where they can be discussed and examined calmly? As someone whose most usual stance has been a plague on both your houses, I am hopeful."

Yes, I realize Farrell and Holbo both post on Crooked Timber; and yes, I realize that Farrell's commented here recently as well; so yes, I realize that we're all patting each other on the back in some respects, and that there's something uncouth about it all, but positive play is positive play.  If I hadn't written this entry, people would've read that article thinking the praise unvarnished and entirely deserved ... which it is, despite recent evidence to the contrary.  (In the aforelinked conversation, everyone reserves the right to talk past everyone else and demands the right to be offended when anyone talks past them.  In other words: not with a ten foot pole.)

Concerning Psychoanalytic "Truths," the IWW & Gangesa's Tattvacintamani

[Note: an update for interested parties.]

The area below contains some very typical sophistry which, for reasons I can't entirely explain outside of a general sense of annoyance, I took some time I don't have to respond to.  You can see the original (as well as other objects worthy of hearty ridicule) by putting your eye to glass and peering deep into the heart of faux-liberatory dogmatism. 

I should add: although this thinker belongs to the Long Sunday collective, he belongs there as much as Eugene Debs would have "belonged" on the current Cabinet (if you reversed the political valences such that Debs were neoconservative and the Bush Cabinet composed of Wobblies).  I may've squeezed more volatile political history into that sentence than the rest of everything I've ever written in my entire life combined.  So proceed, if you dare, and place your eye firmly 'gainst the glass:

The Machine's Only As Reliable As Its Cogs; or, Are Such Statements Ever True?

Whilst rereading Rereading Jack London (1996) I often stumble across statements like “Naturalism’s claim to be a catalyst for change is perpetually undermined by its own combination of pessimistic determinism and Social Darwinism” (151).  Readers familiar with this humble blogger’s dissertation immediately recognize one cog in Christopher Hugh Gair’s claim that’ll cause some consternation, but I’m not on the Social Darwinian beat for the time being.  I want to focus on the category of the claim itself, on what it means to refer offhand to a body of thought so grossly generalized as to never resemble that to which it presumably points.  To put it another way: any summary of Marxism will, to the studious Marxist, summarize vulgar Marxism.  Another still: everyone else’s interpretation of Das Kapital so exaggerates some sub-sub-sub-claim of a point itself so inconsequential that to call what he or she preaches “Marxism” sends Marx sliding down a slippery slope (at the bottom of which Andrew and Dale Carnegie consume crumpets while discussing the merits of the responsibility assumption).  Given that contemporary “categorical” debates are always hotly contested, why are critics so comfortable with historical categories?  At what point does the need to qualify end and a category’s life as a cog begin?  I ask this in part because of CR’s comment yesterday:

And the thing is, things are heading now in the other direction. Ebb tide. Toward serious scholarship, historicism in the New Historicist sense, but even worse: textual criticism is coming back (for non-initiates, that doesn’t mean close reading but rather hanging out in libraries, looking at multiple copies of the same dusty book—yuck!) Theoretical extravagance is regarded as outre and kind of silly. [...] In other words, a specter’s haunting English, a specter that brings narrowness, specialization, horrendous boredom, and useless expertise.

CR implies that theory is as parasitic on the work of “serious scholars” as their work is on whatever unacknowledged theories subtend it.  If that’s the case—if these categorical beasts are as beastly as I contend—then despite the horrendous boredom works of “serious scholarship” ostensibly entail,[1] without such work the quality of theoretical tinkering will decline.  The machine’s only as reliable as its cogs.  What disaster would befall the machinist who depends on cogs of talc!  Springs all sprung but the talc cogs have evaporated and the machine, dear readers, the machine, its innards dusted with a fine coat of talc, grit for future gears. 

Grit for future gears!

Given that any theoretical approach necessarily builds on these historical commonplaces, its fate is inextricably bound to the claims beneath the claims beneath its claims.  If some of those are of dubious quality, then no matter how sophisticated or interesting the theoretical edifice built upon them, they fall with the foundation.  Everywhere I turn I find foundations I wouldn’t even pitch a tent upon.  (Much less build a house.)  Since muddy foundations and putty cogs endanger all in equal measure, the call to continue pouring water on dirt from mixers made of talc seems to me the worst possible solution for all involved. 

To put it another way (back on the beat!), the critical race theorist whose formulation of racialism involves a discussion of Social Darwinism in Gilded Age or Progressive America either 1) discovers the fact that Social Darwinism did not exist as advertised and adjusts his account to reflect more accurately the lineage of contemporary racial politics or 2) he never learns that Social Darwinism as advertised was a myth, never adjusts his account and, consequently, disseminates an inaccurate (and depending on the nature of the inaccuracy, potentially dangerous) account of race in contemporary America.   

One question I demand answered by all invested parties is whether what I’ve said here rings true or is 1) simply more evidence of my substantial historicist bias or 2) another example of the same empiricist logic behind my persnickety resistance to psychoanalysis.

[1]This argument, I should add, elides the fact that the writer’s as responsible for the quality of the work written as his or her approach, evidence or what-not.  I can still sit down and read with enjoyment David Wallace’s Chaucerian Polity.  We all feel this way about certain authors, as well.  For example, I always find myself mesmerized by J.G. Ballard, but were you to describe to me the plot of Concrete Island, there’s little chance I’d be interested in reading it.

All My Vintage Peeps! or Knapp and Some Knappy Conjectures

I promised to dish about Literary Interest and have so far failed to follow through.  But I have a reason:

Despite being a straightforward read free of jargon and impressive citations, Knapp's book bedevils those who desire summary.  The prose consists of tight argumentative knots which defy citational logic.  (Though maybe not that way.)  Especially interesting is the manner in which his prose enacts his argument about authorized implicature (about which more momentarily).  Let me walk you through his argument:

An author intends "readers to imagine that certain things were the case; that is, he intended his readers to imagine certain states of affair."  Furthermore, an author also intends "those imagined states of affairs to to be connected to each other in ways that would sustain certain logical inferences from one to the other."  Were this author Milton--the subject of the first chapter--he would have "intended his reader to imagine states of affair whose interconnections would be tight enough, for example, to sustain an inference from Eve's speaking to Eve's having a mouth; or from Adam's standing to Adam's being in contact with the ground" (9).  Knapp's rhetorical strategy here is almost Darwinian in its cunning.  Darwin opens The Origin with a discussion of selective breeding--a commonplace of human society since we've settled down--because he knows that if he builds on common sense he's locked his readers down.  Knapp works in the same vein: first he convinces you that if Eve speaks she has a mouth, then throws a viscious left and sends you reeling:

What happens if the rest of the work doesn't logically follow in the same way Eve's speaking entails her having a mouth?  Since the world the author wanted to create cannot meet the Eve's-speech-to-Eve's-mouth standard of logical implication, Knapp wonders whether the author's foisted his authorial responsibility onto his readers.  "[A] critic is empowered to imagine additional states of affairs that will enhance the coherence of the world projected by the author," Knapp argues, "even if the states of affairs thus added are utterly foreign to the author's intentions" (25).  The sign to the left says it all.  How can the coherence of an author's imagined world rely on the work of critics who would would "enhance the coherence of the world projected by the author even if the states of affairs thus added are utterly foreign to the author's intentions."  That makes no sense.  Or so it seems.

According to Knapp, an author invests in his work as coherent a world as he can muster because he knows his readers will speculate on its value.  Is Knapp introducing an economic metaphor into his formulation? 

He is. 

Only it's not his. 

It belongs to Keats and Boccaccio.

Knapp is no Keats.  Knapp is no Boccaccio.  If you sense the imminent arrival of an argument akin to the Darwinian argument alluded to above, you've more insight into Knappy Knappian thought than I.  Tomorrow I'll continue working through his argument for you.  In the meantime I'd be really interested in hearing where you think he's headed.  Not because I enjoy the feeling of rank superiority which accompanies posts in which I summarize books you haven't read.  I'm not that kind of asshole.  I only wonder if Knapp's rigor is so rigorous that people smarter than me can connect-the-dots faster than I can. 

The first person who can wins a package of vintage staled Peeps. Here at Chez Kaufman we have an extensive collection of vintage Peeps.  Perhaps you prefer the rich pink merlot of Chateaux Rose Avec La Pip 1997.   I personally recommend the mellow, mild flavor of Coppola's vintage 1974 "Banana Daquiri" yellow Peeps.  Were there a divinity beyond divine, what the kids refer to as "the Fredo" would be the Peeps of choice for all the bullet-ridden rappers.  Come to Chez Kaufman with solutions to Knapp's riddle in hand.

Seminars and Seders: A Lazy Quasi-Comparative History of Neither

I wrote the previous post I fully intending on working on my dissertation until the very moment I fell asleep.  Alas! I had to check my email, and it contained the graduate seminar descriptions for the fall quarter.  Since I've been having this conversation about the extent to which literary studies houses Theory quite a bit lately, I can't help myself: I will post some of the course descriptions of some of the upcoming UCI English, Comparative Literature and Critical Theory Emphasis seminars below the fold.  Lest I seem to be attacking the venerable institution which will someday (maybe even soon) authorize all the shit I've stuffed in my head the past six years, I should note that, as a genre, the "course description" suffers from the same Madison Avenue-inflected bombast of theory or anti-theory anthologies, i.e. just as you must buy this anthology over all other anthologies so must you attend this seminar above all other seminars. 

Wow.  Amazing what'll spur Seder flashbacks.  If I could figure out how to type in Hebrew, I'd impress you all by reproducing the Four Questions which must be answered once a year, every year, by the youngest, drunkest Jew at the table during what's supposed to be a celebration of the Egyptian Exodus.  (As recounted in one of the books of the Original Testament.  Which one escapes me for the moment.  I'll be brainier come morning.)  Since I'm unable to impress you with the modicum of Hebrew I acquired during a decade of Wednesday evenings spent attending Hebrew school, I'll have to settle for saying that to my knowledge these seminar descriptions aren't different from all other seminar descriptions. 

We "Irvinites" don't place pillows behind our heads and backs to differentiate this seminar from all other seminars. 

We're not required by the Lord who brought us out of Egypt to be Our Lord to sing the most entertaining and repetitive song ever written; one which is both called and seemingly consists only of the word dahyenu.  Typical lyrics run the gamut from dahy-dahyenu, dahy-dahyenu to dahy-dahy-enu, dahy-dahy-enu, dahy-dahy-enu, dahyenu, dahyenu!  Few songs are more fun to sing but none are more fun to sing as an increasingly drunk fourth grader.  (I'm convinced that Andy Merrill, creator and writer of The Brak Show, is both Jewish and Dahyenu's biggest fan.  How else to explain "The Song that Never Ends"?)

We neither drink to excess as the Lord commandeth nor do we leave any alcohol for Elijah.  We know Elijah's the absent-presence of all that's phallogocentric...alright, alright, we know that Elijah's an absent-presence who somehow manages to imbibe a goblet of wine better left for the Easter Bunny.  Because if you had to choose between a guy whose name--in Hebrew Eliyahu, which just so happens to my Hebrew name and is the name (abbreviated as "Eli") I went by for about half of my formative years--means "my God's name is Yahu" and the Easter Bunny, who would you prefer do the drinking?  But I seriously digress:

My point is that us "Irvinites" don't take super-double-special seminars seeped in Theory which brings us out of our dogmatic slumber to be our Theory; we take what I believe are classes representative of those taken by English and Comparative Literature graduate students across America.  If I'm mistaken--and I increasingly believe that I may overestimate the pervasiveness of Theory because I've come into my own at Irvine--feel free to inform me of my simple- and small-mindedness.  (LB, I'm looking at you because most of the other graduate students I've met who aren't from Irvine are liable to fib because they mistake Irvine's interests for mine.)

To close this puppy out:

You'll see the sort of courses I could've taken this quarter if you choose to click below the fold, and then you'll understand better why I assume there's such a thing as Theory and why I'm so often frustrated by the way in which it instantiates itself in my environs.  (Note to the careful: I'm not criticizing these courses, most of which strike me as interesting, only trying to paint a picture of why I might think that Theory exists and is pervasive.)

The Interpronomicon, or Samizdat for the Literary Scholar

Before I get started: If you're a regular reader but didn't comment on yesterday's post, I'm still 28 readers short of winning the bet, so I'd love it if you checked in.  On to business!

Theory business!  (ignores collective groans )

When I lunched with my advisor this past Monday, he told me about a very dangerous book with a very froufy front cover called Literary Interest.  He warned me that while I should read this book I should under no circumstances attempt to emulate the style of Steven Knapp's argument.  Nor should I attempt to learn anything from it.  I should read it, acknowledge that it exists then squirrel it away until such a time as I might have tenure.  He said it would ruin my chances of an academic career, a social life or ever getting remarried after the wife realizes how much better she can do than me.  (We have that sort of advisor/advisee relationship.)  According to my advisor, Steven Knapp wrote this book shortly before disappearing across the Mexican border to fight alongside Poncho Villa.   Or becoming the 11^th provost of Johns Hopkins.  One of the two.  The point being you're damned curious to know what's contained in this little volume--it runs all of 142 pages before reaching its horrifying conclusion--but since I've only read the first chapter, you'll have to wait.  I know that's inconsiderate of me to build up your hopes only to shatter them mercilessly on the cold ceramic tile I recently installed on Acephalous.  (Do you like?)

I fully intended on presenting you with a taste of the Interpronomicon tonight.  Then it dawned on me that the first chapter works the argument of his and Walter Benn Michaels' "Against Theory" and "Against Theory II" through its implications for Milton's Paradise Lost. 

And that can't be that dangerous because I already know it.  I've read both those essays and my career, life and marriage are still intact.  There there be dragons ain't the scout's shout yet.  They must not appear until chapter two, which I'll read tomorrow.  All the theoretical equivalents of dragons and flatbreads concocted from the blood of Christian children (I am Jewish and have to eats my matzahs) will be communicated on the morrow, once I have fully imbibed the evil that is! that is! that is! negative capability?  Negative Capability!?!

Bulwark Against an Actual Empire, or another Maginot Line?

I would like to inform everyone that Timothy Burke has christened me "Scott the Merciless."  Really.  He did. 

No he didn't.  You caught me.  He said:

The deeper problem here is something Scott has been pretty merciless about at his own blog and The Valve: a meaningful reading of alliances made and alliances broken requires fidelity to those tools of analytic social science and historicism that theory (poststructuralist and otherwise) mostly abjures or uses in a mood of romantic bemusement. [...]  What I'm referring back to is Scott's remarks about the mobility of a cultural studies/theory sense of the politics: its "left" is not any kind of socially incarnated left (save the social habitus of the constituencies drawn to the writing and consumption of theory, which is semi-effaced in the writing of such work). Its sense of left-ness is derived from a mutable, shifting search of representational space for transgression, liminality, culture-war, contestation, whereupon sides are taken, tents are pitched, and a left posture affirmed.

Funny how anytime Burke says something it sounds so much more eloquent than when I do.  But he has a point: I do think that.  This whole conversation has me reliving the week I spent reading nothing but back issues of Critical Inquiry in preparation for the Theory's Empire event.

Anti-Thoughts about the Anti-Desires of the Deeply Stupid, or Ideas Obscured by Assumptions

So many points to make.  So little desire to organize.

The debate about the debate about the debate about the debate about Theory rages on.  (Much, much more below the fold.)

Theory Friday: In Which Our Hero Discusses the Merits of His Heroism

What can I say?  I want to be like Mike.

On to the show!  I can't contest Matt's claim that the introduction to Theory's Empire declares the timeliness, nay! necessity of an anti-Norton anthology with a bombast the articles it introduces can't support.  But what about the introduction to The Norton?  Are its sins of inflation as grievous as Theory's Empire's?  On the first page, students learn:

[Theory] entails a mode of questioning and analysis that goes beyond the earlier New Critical research into the "literariness" of literature.  Because of the effects of post-structuralism, cultural studies, and the new social movements, especially the women's and civil rights movements, theory now entails skepticism toward systems, institutions, and norms; a readiness to take critical stands and to engage in resistance; an interest in blind spots, contradictions, and distortions (often discovered to be ineradicable); and a habit of linking local and personal practices to the larger economic, political, historical, and ethical forces of culture.

Observe how the uncredited author (I'll call him/her "Andy") of the preface forces the students to make a distinction: on the one hand, there are the limited claims of the New Critics who focus solely on the "literariness of literature."  Apparently Andy never read I'll Take My Stand, the New Critical/Agrarian manifesto whose authors aren't interested in the literariness of literature so much as attacking "apologists of industrialism."  Denude the early anti-capitalist dimension to early New Critical thought and the rationale behind their theories concerning coherent aesthetic experiences seem awful small-minded.  That said, I won't claim the agrarian movement imagined itself to be progressive; then again, many of their complaints about the excesses of capitalism can still circulate in theoretical debates today:

The word science has acquired a certain sanctitude. It is out of order to quarrel with science in the abstract, or even with the applied sciences when their applications are made subject to criticism and intelligence. The capitalization of the applied sciences has now become extravagant and uncritical; it has enslaved our human energies to a degree now clearly felt to be burdensome. The apologists of industrialism do not like to meet this charge directly; so they often take refuge in saying that they are devoted simply to science! They are really devoted to the applied sciences and to practical production. Therefore, it is necessary to employ a certain skepticism even at the expense of the Cult of Science, and to say, it is an Americanism, which look innocent and disinterested, but really is not either.

As a younger lad I fought to connect this strain of agrarian anti-industrialism to the contemporary critiques of capitalism.  Although I never quite accomplished that feat, to this day I wonder what those who oppose capitalism on theoretical grounds imagine will happen were they their opposition magically transformed into something, I don't know, remotely efficacious.  Would their vision of unalienated labor resemble that of the New Critics Andy casually dismisses in a clause?  In other words: if forced to articulate a positive program, what would it look like? 

It bothers me that literary critics can establish careers on an oppositional position without ever having to think through the implications of their arguments.  It reminds me too much of Socialists, Communists and Stalinists in the 1920s who, unlike the anti-Stalinist Socialists, chose to ignore evidence of the purges so that they might continue to fight the good fight in the hallways of Harvard and Columbia.  That's unfair.  (And also intrudes on David Horowitz's lunatic territory.  However, I have a point; he has a jeremiad.)  My point is simply that much of what passes for "Theory" in literature departments stake a wholly oppositional claim, one which never demands a positive platform, because for more than 25 years they haven't been forced to think through what their position entails.  They should be.

I've been on the verge of "the other hand" for some time now.  Here it is:

On the other hand, after aligning contemporary "theory" with the women's and civil rights movements that everyone with a smattering of history (i.e. not our students) knows preceded it by at least a decade, Andy announces theory's sole ownership of "skepticism towards systems, institutions, and norms."  It's also cornered the market on critical stands and engagements in resistance.  What Andy's done is deny the New Critics their day in the oppositional sun and trumpeted the power of theory.  But wait!  I'm a liar!  I havent' even reached the introduction yet: all of this information and obfuscation's actually in the Preface!

Tomorrow I will stop lying and discuss the introduction, which merits its own discussion.  My point here, as I think will become increasingly clear on the morrow, is that Matt's correct: there's a real problem with the introduction to Theory's Empire.  But though I agree, I will expand his argument to encompass the genre of introductions, and I'll demand he read the essays in Theory's Empire instead of the terrible introduction.  I will insist that he carefully read my contribution to the event (linked to above, around, and all over the place), and ask him whether he thinks I'm being unfair to the claims of theorists. 

(I will then apologize to Matt for forcing him to read a really long essay by demanding he do so in a public venue.  Then I'll concede that my tactics were cheap but I really think he should see whether I'm attacking Theory qua, um, theory?  Theory?)

[Cross-posted, you know, over there.  Where else would it be?  You think I can just cross-post stuff anywhere?]

On People Deeply Stupid & the Wrong, the Wronger and the Wrongest, or Comments on Comments

Instead of inserting myself into the discussion piling up in the comments today, I will pull rank and respond to them in all their diversity in a new post.

To respond to Mike's question about the icy reception of my latest offering on the Valve, I can only say this: John Bruce is a lunatic.  I've said this before in a more entertaining manner (and once in a most entertaining manner).  Quite frankly, the man's issues have little to do with me.  Case in point: he's already written another screed, this time against Rich and I.  (I'll let Rich defend himself, as he is more than capable of doing so.)  The sheer stupidity and intellectual dishonesty for which Bruce is so deservedly known surfaces again.  To wit:

I'm taken to task for choosing to be known by my entire name.  (Because I haven't explained that before.)  My responses to his palaver aren't monumentally unsubtle mockeries but "copious and near hysterical reactions."  The etiology of his confusion baffles me.  It may be that he can't recognize knee-to-balls satire and makes an honest but deeply stupid mistake.  Or it may be that he can recognize it and chooses not to seem to because to do so would be terribly unflattering.  The thing is, once you have your audience debating whether you're an idiot or dishonest, well, what's the point of continuing? 

Now, I have to take issue with Matt, whose wrongness is wronger than any wrong has been wrong before: Oblivion is a wonderful collection.  (Full disclosure: I've written, poorly, on Infinite Jest before.)  The focus on corporate culture works pays off precisely because it refuses to partake of the "pity the poor white-collar slave" narrative so common now in contemporary fiction.  (David Grand, I enjoyed your novel, but I'm still looking at you.)  The significant thing about David Foster Wallace--not mentioned, I'm obliged to add, in Bruce's roster of those known by three names--is that his gimmicks should be tired by now.  In literary historical terms, he should be the footnote he so loves.  But he isn't.  Oblivion is a masterful.  Every one of his novels, if nothing else, is a compendium of pithy description.  (From Oblivion, "rorschach shubbery" springs to mind.)  Not that I prefer it to Infinite Jest.  No book has embodied the Whole Sick Crew's "be cool, but care" mantra better than Infinite Jest.  (I may have even said that before.) 

Cam, I'm glad you didn't sneak a glance at Lyle Lovett's member.  If you had you'd be no better than Larry David, who didn't so much as glance but stared at Muggsy Bogues' member.  You, my friend, have bathroom etiquette.

Matt and Rich: your discussion will be discussed in a future post.  The short answer is that I'm sticking to my guns.  I believe that the debates over the legitimacy of theory produced far more sophisticated approaches to literature than current "debates" do.  Which means that I agree with Matt on the uselessness of much of contemporary theory as applied to literature.  I'm becoming increasingly aware that the segregation of "Theory" in literature departments has created a situation in which I feel duty-bound to attack the silliness of "Theory" when, in truth, my beef is with the misapplication of bad "Theory" by literary scholars.  However, this will take more than an evening to work through, so for the moment I demur.

Not Bedazzled by the Norten Lights: On The Literary Wittgenstein, by Not Negative Nancy

As those of you who read my contribution to the Theory's Empire event no doubt remember, what I value about the anthology is that it demands readers think about the conflicting claims of different theoretical approaches.  So I'm pleasantly surprised that Marjorie Perloff's "But Isn't the Same at Least the Same" and David Schalkwyk's "Wittgenstein's 'Imperfect Gardens'" essays in The Literary Wittgenstein work according to logically incompatible assumptions. 

Perloff argues that Wittgenstein's language is translatable because it's concerned with language being translatable.  Like Beckett, Wittgenstein's vocabulary consists of personal and demonstrative pronouns, ordinary verbs, basic nouns, and simple declarative sentences.  The result is that his work, like Beckett's, can easily be translated.  No controversies over the relative merit of the various translations of The Philosophical Investigations swirl because his quaint diction and calm style make the translator's job easy.  Thus, Perloff concludes,

Such language games will become increasingly prominent in an age of globalization where the availability of translation is taken for granted.  Poets and fiction writers, I predict, will increasingly write in what we might call, keeping Wittgenstein's example in mind, a language of translatability. (52)

There's no wrangling over the details and implications of Wittgenstein's work the way there is in the German translation of Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour."  Here's the English:

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars.  Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the twon...
My mind's not right.

Here's Perloff's analysis of it:

[W]hat eludes [the translator, Manuel] Pfister is Lowell's particular tone.  "One dark night," for starters, has a fairy-tale quality (as in "Once upon a time") that gives an ironic edge to the reference to St. John of the Cross's "Dark Night of the  Soul"--a quality lost in the German In einer dunklen Nacht.  In line 2, the pun on "Tudor ("two-door") Ford" disappears even though Pfister retains the absurdly pretentious brand name.  And his rendition of the third line is at once too specific and too long-winded: Lowell's casual "I watched" becames the emphatic ic hielt Ausshau, and Scheinwerfer ausgeschaltet ("headlights turned off") does not allow for the resonance of "lights" or of "turned down," which here connotes beds as well as the lights themselves. (35)

She continues in this vein for another paragraph, but you see her point: that mode of analysis that cannot be done on Wittgenstein's writing.  "Wittgenstein's propositions are by means untranslatable in the sense that Lowell's "Skunk Hour" [is] untranslatable" (36, emphasis hers).  Quoting Wittgenstein, she contends that his language has "remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions" because of its near-perfect translatability (43).  Hammered home yet?  Good.  On to Schalkwyk, who begins his essay with a discussion of the untranslatability of Wittgenstein's prose:

The statement that philosophy should be written as poetry appears in Culture and Value: Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosphie dadurch zusammengefast zu haben, indem ich sagte: Philosophie durfte man eigentlich nur dichten (CV 24).  Peter Winch translates this as: "I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written as a form of poetic composition."  But his formulation doesn't quite convey the sense of the original.  This is not the translator's fault, because English has no equivalent for the word dichten--an intransitive verb meaning to write poetry.  Wittgenstein is saying ... that the activities of writing philosophy and writing poetry are closely related: to philosophize is to poetize--one should write philosophy only ("nur") as one would write poetry; philosophy should be nothing other than the writing of poetry.

I'm reserving judgment on whether I prefer Perloff or Schalkwyk's account of Wittgenstein until I finish the volume and work through the Philosophical Investigations on my own--Dissertation?  What dissertation?--but what I want to stress for now is that juxtaposing these essays in the manner that Gibson and Huemer (the collection's editor) have focuses readers' attentions on the terms of the debates and the conflicting assumptions even sophisticated readers of Wittgenstein bring to his work. 

This focusing is exactly what's absent from conventional Theory anthologies: Freud is presented alone instead of alongside critics.   (Later psychoanalytic thinkers who tinker with Freud's work don't count as "critics" since they assume the validity of core psychoanalytic concepts.)  Thus far The Literary Wittgenstein performs the function of introducing me to the concepts in a critical framework which precludes the uncritical acceptance encouraged by Theory anthologies. 

And I just wanted to say that. 

Because I don't want to be thought a Negative Nancy.

Even though that would be a fair description.  (Well-deserved even.)

Super-Adequate Structural Homologies, or The Ornithorynchus Shuffle

Frank Sulloway titles his recent review of James Secord's Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation with brazen inaccuracy: "He Almost Scooped Darwin."  In his response to my contribution to the Theory's Empire event, Sean McCann criticized the distinction I had made between Althusserian interpellation and Foucauldian discourse:

[A]t some level the Althusserian account of the interpellation of the subject and the Foucauldian account (in Archaelogy) of its disappearance are in conflict.  But the conflict isn’t really that deep, is it? What the two accounts share, of course, is a sense that autonomous personhood is wholly the illusory creation of larger, limiting structures...In other words, would it really be wrong for a latterday American academic to recognize an affinity here?

As I noted in my response, Sean's right to say that with sufficient conceptual distance the Althusserian account of social determination resembles Foucault's.  Much is lost in the acquisition of that distance.  (And by much, I mean "the premises.")  Granted, McCann's operating in the tradition of the New Historicist, Benn Michaels Brigade.  The NHBMB values structural homologies, and McCann's analysis pointed to the possibility of a structural homology between Althusserian and Foucauldian thought which would've belied the historical and personal animus between these two pillars of French post-structuralist thinking. 

I spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about the Althusser/Foucault homology and I still don't know where I stand on it.  But it's keyed me into the appearance of homologies of this ignore-the-premise-focus-on-the-conclusion sort.  Hence my problem with Sulloway's title and the argument sitting pretty beneath it.  To claim even titularly that Chambers' nearly scooped Darwin is to fundamentally misunderstand the significance of the theory of natural selection.  Such a claim entails a cult of personality based first around the anonymous author (later revealed to be Chambers) of the Vestiges and later around Darwin (after the publication of the Origin).  If Sulloway's argument held the water I think drowns it, this cult of personality would have to be founded on the principle that the public adored anyone who said "Things Change!" 

Because "Things Change!" is the extent of the connection between the intellectual content of Chambers' Vestiges and that of Darwin's Origin.  (Don't take my word for it.  Read the Vestiges yourself.)  The most significant difference between Chambers and Darwin concerns the mechanism of evolution:

Darwin had natural selection.  Chambers had monstrous birth.

He discusses the power of monstrous birth in Chapter 14 of the Vestiges.  He first grants that the natural laws of reproduction demand that a mother of a given species give birth to a child of the same species.  But what if man in his inability to be everywhere all the time has missed the occasional monstrous birth?  Is it possible that every once in a while a goose gives birth to a mouse?  According to Chambers, who cites as proof the work of Charles Babbage, we cannot disprove that no geese has ever given birth to a mouse. 

Babbage posited that what one person infers to be a natural law may be the result of an inadequate but effectively infinite set of evidence.  Chambers sat his readers behind Babbage’s "calculating machine" as it ticks 1, 2, 3, 4, all the way to 100,000,000. Reasoning inductively, he argued, a rational person would assume 100,000,0001 would follow 100,000,000. Instead, the calculating machine ticks 100,010,002. The only conclusion, according to Babbage, is that

the law that each number presented by the engine is greater by unity than the preceding number, which law the observer had deduced from an induction of a hundred million instances, was not the true law that regulated its action, and that the occurrence of the number 100,010,002 at the 100,000,002^nd term was as necessary a consequence of the original adjustment, and might have been as fully foreknown at the commencement, as was the regular succession of any one of the intermediate numbers to its immediate antecedent.

Chambers analogized the inability to deduce the engine’s actual programming by induction without a calculation of daunting complexity with the sheer expanse of time within which the natural laws of reproduction have worked. And if one can no more deduce the absoluteness of these laws than the engine’s original programming, it is possible that, at some divinely predetermined time, a goose gave birth to a rat. Chambers noted the occasional retrogression of one species into another, as when the heart of a human fetus "goes no farther than the three-chambered form, so that it is the heart of a reptile."

If the heart of a human fetus can retrogress via an "under-adequacy" into that of a reptile, why should it be beyond the bounds of reason "to imagine an access of favourable conditions to reverse the phenomenon," which is only to say

it is no great boldness to surmise that a super-adequacy in the measure of this under-adequacy (and the one thing seems as natural an occurrence as the other) would suffice in a goose to give its progeny the body of a rat, and produce the ornithorynchus [duck-billed platypus], or might give the progeny of an ornithorynchus the mouth and feet of a true rodent, and thus complete at two stages the passages from the aves [birds] to mammalia. (emphasis mine)

Chambers has naturalized the idea of monstrous births via his appeal to Babbage; now it is as natural for a goose to give birth to a mouse as a gander.  But that's not all.  According to this logic, birds can "evolve" into mammals in "two stages."  (Granted, there's a real logical problem with Chambers logic: if one goose gives birth to one mouse, with whom with that mouse reproduce?  A goose?  But monstrous births are rare by Chambers' own admission, so the likelihood of two geese giving birth to one male and one female mouse is extremely slim.)  The problems with Sulloway's claim should be obvious now:

He pits Chambers' two monstrous births against the imperceptible variations of billions of organisms reproducing over billions and billions of years.  To put it another way:

2 vs. 1,000,000,000^{1,000,000,000}

That said, Sulloway isn't wrong to argue for the significance of Chambers' book.  It did compel a number of people to think about the laws of heredity and it was (and remained) more popular than the Origin until 1901.  What Sulloway doesn't mention is that in Chambers' scheme these monstrous births are the product of divine fiat, a fact which may account for its popularity.  Furthermore, Sulloway never mentions the person responsible for priming the well Chambers would later pump so successfully: Erasmus Darwin.

Such is the danger of acquiring any level of abstraction in which all but the grossest of distinctions are leveled.  I don't think Sean's proposition abstracts itself into imprecision in the same manner.  Still, I do believe this danger lurks behind the quick construction of any structural homology. 

Thus concludes today's lesson.  If you're still reading, congratulations!  You may be a future reader of my dissertation!

Life among the Bhabhatistas: a Memoir in the Key of Clatter, for Dry Bones and Cello

Brad Delong complains of the noise my dry bones make when they clatter.  Then he sprints below decks and stands, in the boiler room, at the contact point, before the mast.  (I'm relieved his metaphor's metaphorical: I would pity the crew quartered in the boiler room.)  He says:

Over at The Valve, they are talking about the book Theory's Empire--and thus about the damage done by "Critical Theory" and its spawn on the American humanities over the past generation. But most of it is all too... theoretical. What work can you do with statements like...

...and then he quotes, among other things, the second half of the fourth paragraph of my contribution as an example of the bloodlessness of the Valve's critique of Theory.  Now, DeLong is sharp on matters economic, but if his reading of my essay's typical of his analysis of all matters outside economics, then I applaud his decision to stick to his strengths.  On what grounds, if not logical, would he have literary critics confront the excesses of more Theoretically-minded critics?  My essay, as you know, fingers the decline of rigorous thought as the motive force behind the rise of Theory in the humanities.  And I argue my point, if you please, rigorously.

But rigor and logic are bloodless, whereas invective is sanguifluous.  In Timothy and Sean's posts, the streets run crimson as the life runs from the things which late were Theories.   Those posts excel where mine fail: they make sweeping arguments designed to appeal to those who are already convinced of Theory's vacuity.  In other words, they have the rhetorical flair which appeals to someone who, like DeLong, dismisses Theory as so much blather.  And some of it is.  However, no one who practices one or another of the regnant Theories will read Timothy or Sean's posts and reevaluate their life's work.  They will recognize, in both, the hostility that they and theirs have (admittedly) earned.  But it still reads hostile, and it's still likely to be ignored.  Consider an example:

Sean and Timothy are Generals in the War Against Theory.  All available intelligence points to a battalion of Bhabhatistas hiding in the Deconstructed Zone.  On the eve of battle, General McCann delivers a rousing condemnation of the Bhabhatistas.  General Burke follows suit.  The troops, intoxicated by the rhetoric, grab their gear and prepare for the assault.

Sounds about right to me.  But what would happen if Covert Operative McCann delivered that same condemnation to Bhabhatistas he bunks with?  How long before the life begins running from the rapidly de-sanguinating body of poor C.O. McCann?  Not long at all.  So C.O. McCann, knowing his intentions and his audience, would probably choose to encourage defection by other means. 

"We have the logic," he mouths to a bunk-mate.

"But, the Bhabha said..."

"Forget about the Bhabha!" he whispers with a vehemence belying volume.  "The Bhabha lied.  Logic is real..."

"...The Logic is The Real?"

"No," McCann mumbles.  "Logic is real.  As in 'it exists.'"

"Oh, I see, I see.  It 'exists.'"

"Not 'it "exists."'  C'mon on now!"  Then patiently.  "Look at me.  See?  No fingers.  It.  Ex.  Ists.  It.  Ex.  Iists.  It.  Ex.  Ists."

"The Real?"

"No!"  Then hushed: "Not 'The Real'!  Logic.  Lo-gic."

"Is the Logic like candy?"

"Yes.  It is.  Exactly like candy.  So you'll defect?"

"I suppose.  But wait!  You said 'the Bhabha lied'!"

"That's right.  I said 'the Bhabha lied.'  Now get some sleep.  We have a lot to talk about in the morning."

From that point forward, C.O. McCann would tell him how the Bhabha denied the logic, but how his Che--the Derrida--did not.  He would tell him about the logic and put to lie the lies of The Real.  And that's pretty much what Covert Op. Y.T. did in his contribution. 

Theory's Empire: Fact Checkin' Fukuyama, or Count Them Numbers! They's Numbers!

In "Presentism," Graham Good argues that

Francis Fukuyama's brilliant Hegelian work called The End of History was dismissed unread by most theorists despite (or because of) its offer of a coherent and persuasive vision of where we are in human history.  If any further justification were needed for the dismissal, it was provided by the news that Fukuyama worked fro the U.S. State Department.  So why bother with study, argument or disproof? (288).

For reasons unclear to me then--and still murky to me now--I didn't buy it.  I'd seen too many serious engagements with Fukuyama's argument for Good's claim to be true.  So I did some fact-checking of the cursory but thorough sort beloved by bloggers everywhere.  Here are the results:

A general search of JSTOR reveals 653 citations of Fukuyama's The End of History.  Limit the database to "Language & Literature," and you're left with 57.  "Not bad!" you yell?  (Self-congratulation is so becoming.)  Considering that the "Language & Literature" is one of the four largest sub-groups in the database (63 journals to History's 57, Business' 59 and Economics' 40), that means the vast majority of citations of Fukuyama appear in other fields.  So how seriously have the folks who study "Language & Literature" taken one of the most influential theories--ideological inclinations notwithstanding--of the past 15 years?  Well, they're not doing too well in terms of pure numbers.  But maybe the literary scholars who take the time to challenge his argument do so seriously.  A quick tour:

• Social Text's editorial board loves to publish articles that bash Fukuyama.  To wit: David Scott argues that "Fukuyama's thesis (such as it is) is simply that the changes and transformations taking place around the world today ... should not be seen as isolated, contingent events" (12).  Further condemnation: "it may be felt, rightly or wrongly, that The End of History, elegant and learned as it may appear, is merely the work of the U.S. State Department ideologue and therefore hardly worth reflecting on" (14).  Scott's evalution (such as it is) is simply dismissive, merely the work of a Social Text ideologue and hardly worth reflecting on.
  
• In Specters of Marx, Derrida calls The End of History and the Last Man "the grammar school exercise of a young, industrious, but come-lately reader of Kojeve" who possesses a "sophisticated naivete" and a neoconservative "evangelism" (56, 62). 
• Judith Butler doesn't diss so much as dismiss Fukuyama as Kojeve-lite, then says this about "their" theory: "On the contrary, in a sense that will become important to interrogate, the unrealizability of the end of history is precisely what guarantees futurity, for if history were to have an end, a telos, and if that end were knowable in the present, then the future would be known in advance of its emergence, and the futrue would be always already present" (4).  This is a stunningly general argument: if we know exactly will happen, then the "future" is in some sense "present."  As in: if I throw a ball up in the air, I have created the initial conditions which will allow me to peer into the future.  The fact that she chose Fukuyama over all his fellow millenarians to push this argument backs Good's contention.
• According to Patrick Brantlinger, in Posthistoire: Has History Come to an And? (1992), Lutz Niethammer "treats Fukuyama as an intellectual lightweight, much of whose interpretation of Hegel relies on Kojeve, a major posthistoire speculator" (65).  Brantlinger treats Fukuyama at length, but never seriously engages his argument.  To wit: "Perhaps the wild 'Indians' who attack Fukuyama's wagon train of history are just such critical intellectuals as Marx, Nietzsche, and their descendents--present-day Marxist, feminists, environmentalists, etc.  Meanwhile westward-ho go the wagons, headed for Disneyland" (76).
• Del Ivan Janik doesn't engage Fukuyama so much as mention him--once, in the introduction--to justify his title ("No End of History").  That could be considered a pat dismissal, but since Jameson and Baudrillard are also mentioned in that sentence only to disappear as the essay continues, it's not the sort of dismissal Good's concerned with. 
• Instead of attacking him for his indebtedness to Hegel and Kojeve, Jerome Christensen, chair of Y.T.'s department, complements Fukuyama's profound humility: "The second arresting feature of Fukuyama's argument is its unembarrassed repetitiveness.  Fukuyama freely acknowledges Hegel as his precursor, who announced the end of history in 1806" (454).  Alright, so maybe it's not that complementary, but at least it acknowledges that Hegel was also mistaken about when history ended.  (He also aligns Fukuyama with Jameson and Jerome McGann at other points in the essay.)
• Walter Benn Michaels, of course, takes Fukuyama really, really seriously.

So I suppose Good's right: literary scholars and/or theorists only take seriously the theories of those they want to take seriously.  As for the ones the contemporary historical moment damn nears demands they take seriously?  Not so much.

Theory's Empire: It's The Erudition, Dumb-Ass

(In case Typepad's links are still borking, if you've come from here or here, scroll down to my second comment for not-so-exciting story ... because seriously, I said it was about two people talking about cats.  I hope you weren't expecting fireworks.)

Few of the substantial responses to Mark Bauerlein's recent review of Theory's Empire ignored the "erudition exchange" (quoted below the fold in full).  Michael Berube, sitting in the very same bus, verifies that the exchange took place and even expands upon it.  Apparently this poor graduate student couldn't even spell e-r-u-d-i-t-i-o-n.  Even as the Theory's Empire symposium swung into gear, I couldn't stop thinking about the way people responded to the "erudition exchange."  Sure, I could point to the irony of people forwarding the review around livejournal--"Look!  I know why I hate English professors: they're not erudite anymore.  They only repeat what other people say.  Mark Bauerlein says so.  Pass it on!"--but I knew its status as a meme with wheels had more to do with something other than a lazy confirmation of other people's supposed intellectual shortcomings.  And I think it is.  But until I started seeing the responses to Adam Kotsko's contribution to the colloquium,  I didn't know what it was. 

Now I think I maybe do: it's the erudition, dumb-ass.  No, not the "erudition exchange," nor even what it's meant to convey.  It's the actual lack of a culture in which erudition is valued as anything other than an ideal.  What do I mean?  As I re-read Hillis Miller's response to M.H. Abrams (whose response to Hillis Miller's earlier response to Abrams is the subject of Adam's response to Abrams) about criticism's parasitic but salutary relation to literature, I was struck (for the 91st time this week) by Miller's massive and intimidating erudition.  He can jump from German Romanticism to Greek etymology to Hardy to Hebrew to Heidegger to Wallace Stevens in a single paragraph.  Not only does he seem to remember everything he's ever read, he's able to contextualize it in the service of a deconstructive reading of a poem.  Now, despite the evident hatred of the Right for the epistemic relativism deconstruction--at least in the Right's version--necessarily  entails, I think even Alan Bloom would agree that Miller is a figure who's imbibed all his culture, Western Culture, has offered him.  In short, Miller is a figure who puts to lie the conservative belief that Western Culture breeds traditional values.  (Not that it's that difficult a notion to put to lie.)

Then again, it's not as if the Right has had to contend with figures like Miller lately, i.e. it's not like graduate schools are producing thinkers of Miller's stature anymore, and the reason, I'm this close to contending, isn't that students backslide into the sins of deconstruction, identitarian politics or advocacy criticism.  No, the reason is that it's no longer necessary to read Heidegger before reading Derrida.  (Not that there's anything to profound in that statement.)  But, whereas it's always been easy to fake knowledge, it's never be so easy to be rewarded for deliberately avoiding the cultivation of erudition.  What do I mean?

The balkanization of English departments encourages a culture in which who you don't speak to says more about you and your approach than who you do.  To wit: I can only speak in very, very general terms about the work of Judith Butler.  I sort of know she talks about gender and discourse, and I kind of the general outline of her theory of performativity.  I would know more, but I don't need to in order to 1) complete my dissertation or 2) read the secondary materials necessary to complete my dissertation or 3) talk to the people at the conferences I attend in which I present sections of chapters of my dissertation.  In other words, I don't need to know it, so I don't.  Miller comes from a generation--as the generosity, the genuine learnedness of Abrams' response (as Adam notes) evidences--in which I would've needed to know it.  With so many its out there now, because I can't know everything, I won't try to learn everything, and because I don't try to learn everything, I won't acquire the massive and intimidating erudition of scholars past.

This is not to say that I fit the characterization of the generation of critics who rejected deconstruction for a want of intellectual curiosity.  (There have always been mediocre scholars, after all, for whom the hoarding of facts makes Vidal's epithet--"scholar-squirrels"--entirely apt.)  It's that, institutionally, we're at a moment in which disciplinary balkanization in the humanities is a fact to be accepted.  It's not a decision to be made.  It's a fact instantiated by the failure of the humanities to produce polymaths anymore.  It's a fact instantiated by the failure of the humanities to cultivate erudition anymore.  I suppose why I've rambled on about this for so long is that before today I had considered balkanization a possibility, a direction in which we're currently but not inevitably headed.  But what I recognize now is that it's not.  It's a disciplinary fact to moon over, whine about, celebrate or what-not.  But it's a fact.

I have to let that sink in now. 

More later.

Theory's Empire: Ersatz Theoretical Ecumenicalism & Criticism qua Criticism

Because the Technorati tags at the Valve seem not to be working, I'm cross-posting the completed version of the essay here:

If asked to defend the publication of Theory’s Empire in twenty-six words, I’d write:

"The Politics of Theories of Interpretation,” pp. 235-247
E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

“Is There a Politics of Interpretation?” pp. 248-258
Walter Benn Michaels

“The Politics of Interpretation,” pp. 259-278
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Pilfered from the September, 1982 Critical Inquiry‘s table of contents, those twenty-six words represent the value of Theory’s Empire far more eloquently than I will.

Theory's Empire: Technical Difficulties, Only Elsewhere

So my boundless curiosity compelled me to discover what time it was in Singapore by changing my localization settings on the Valve.  The unfortunate result of this?  Because I had set it to be posted on Tuesday at some obscene hour in the wee of the night in California, when I switched to Singapore time, I confused the "Expression Engine" and it posted my contribution then and there.  So, anyway, if you read me, why not read me there.  It's an excellent essay--yes, I said essay--on the history of post-structuralist thought and the limitations of Theory.  So go already.  It's there.  Read it. 

What?  You want a link?  Here!