A few days ago I ran across this excellent article at The Valve about a fairly recent book called Theory’s Empire. The book collects a number of essays by intelligent and reasonably well-known folks on the subject of some of capital “T” Theory’s more assinine elements. I have wanted to read the book for some time, and this piece, written by contributor Morris Dickstein, makes me even more eager to pluck it down from the shelves.
When an avant garde succeeds it is institutionalized, routinized, and finally trivialized, but this is not where recent theory most fell short. Nor should its major flaw be found in its obtuseness toward earlier theory, which John Ellis establishes so clearly in his essay. Such exuberant claims to novelty are a reflex of any avant garde, though they sit badly in anything that passes for scholarship. Theory respected no foundations but its own, which it rarely questioned. But its chief weakness lay in its hostile or neglectful dealings with literature itself. If we asked what made the critics of theory so incensed, it was this loss of the literary by those who should have been its most ardent guardians. Unlike the major critics in our tradition (but very much like earlier literary academics, philological, historical, even New Critical), they treated literature as material for knowledge rather than a source of personal power, affect, wisdom or beauty. As critics of humanism, they saw literature as symptom and ideology or as discourse in the service of power. They rejected its claims to autonomy or truth. Theory often raised important questions, some of which we are debating here today, but in its professionalized form it too readily fell into what Swift nicely called “the mechanical operation of the spirit.” Perhaps prematurely, Theory’s Empire writes a bittersweet obituary for the theory years but not one that’s ungenerous or undeserved.
The discussion which follows in the comments section is also quite interesting.
