Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson

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СКАЧАТЬ struggle to define its enterprise and mark its similarities to and differences from other theories, when it imagines itself potentially coextensive with the discipline it addresses, when its assumptions come to seem not merely preferable but inevitable and automatic, when it is taken to be a given part of the natural world, when it can be entered into and applied almost without conscious decision, then it no longer counts as theory. Of course, entire bodies of theory do not usually change—develop or decay—all at once. Even though particular theorists can produce founding or radically transforming discourses, other individual practitioners may often seem either to lag behind the development of the discourse as a whole or to succeed in applying a theory in a largely uncritical and unreflective way, thereby perhaps anticipating the general process of normalization. Indeed, part of the comedy or, if you will, the charm of literary discourse in the academy is the survival of any number of discredited interpretive practices alongside the most recent developments in the humanities. Yet if this theoretical babel seems to evoke irresponsible disarray, it also allows for provocatively reductive deflations of what might otherwise be unchallenged claims to sophistication. Even apparently reactionary arguments can keep alive interpretive problems that have not, despite confident claims to the contrary, in fact been superseded by new theoretical moves.

      After three decades of influential recent high theory in France and nearly that many in Britain and the United States, it is also time to admit that not all theory has been of the same quality and not all its practitioners have done thoughtful or impressive work. The best work, to be sure, has left the humanities and social sciences radically transformed and left many of us with distinctly different views of the world than we had before. We have come to understand the social construction of much, including gender, that we took as naturally given before. We have recognized the political character of cultural products that we once thought were above historical processes. Our new notions of language and meaning admit the reality of complex connotation in ways earlier generations consistently resisted. Yet the rapid movement of the life of theory has also produced a lemming-like effect, where opportunistic scholars rush after every new development in hopes of making a name for themselves. If the broader movements have not been faddish, some of their advocates have been. We need to admit this despite the tendency to overreact in defending ourselves against those who burlesque the theory revolution, from Walter Jackson Bate to David Perkins.² It is time to ask what theory has and has not done for us, indeed time to ask more of it than we have to date.

      In 1970s English departments, questions about the usefulness of theory typically devolved into demonstrations that different theoretical perspectives could be productively adapted to the close reading of literary texts. But as theory placed ever more pressure on the produced, consensual, libidinal, or political nature of signification, texts themselves began to become increasingly indeterminate phenomena. More traditional scholars were often anxious about this, though others took pains to reassure them that the task of interpretation was in no way jeopardized by its potentially infinite character. As Paul de Man was fond of saying in the early days of deconstruction, when some thought such an unstable or conflicted view of meaning would momentarily bring the sky down over their heads, “but it does not block discourse.” In other words, far from inhibiting interpretation—the universal business of the humanities—deconstruction, like other bodies of theory, would actually open more opportunities for interpretation. Thus, in what may seem a curious paradox to those in other disciplines, academics in English have come to accept (in practice if not openly) that the meaning of a literary text is, as it were, wholly up for grabs, while the sacred character of the text itself is indisputable. In this dynamic, I would argue, it has never been the sacredness of the text that has been at issue. The literary text is defended so as to distract attention from the real object to be protected—the profession of literary studies.

      There is nothing necessarily illicit about the use of deconstruction (or most other bodies of theory) for various kinds of immanent textual analysis. With the rise of cultural studies, to be sure, as I shall suggest in chapter 4, immanent textual analysis appropriately became suspect. Until then, the key problem with the interpretation of individual texts arose when a depoliticized and radically decontextualized version of immanent analysis became a transcendent moral value, as often happens in English studies. When Derrida, for example, practices close textual analysis, the status of the text as an object of veneration or doubt is always open to question. Moreover, he generally reads individual texts to raise larger critical and social issues. Following Derrida, we may, then, analyze a literary narrative so as to address the issue of the general social demand that we narrate our subjectivity. However, under the leadership of what was once the Yale school, deconstruction in America restored the text to a venerated position and militantly dropped any consideration of larger social questions. Textual contradictions became merely rhetorical occasions for ecstasy or despair.

      In this respect, though, literary deconstruction was merely following the pattern of other bodies of theory in the United States. Most bodies of theory, in fact, have characteristically compromised their claims to self-reflection and social or professional criticism in order to gain a place in the modern academic establishment. In other words, the object of interpretation and the content of interpretive discourse are considered appropriate subjects for discussion and scrutiny, but the interests of the interpreter and the discipline and society he or she serves are not. This restriction has produced a number of contradictory, almost schizophrenic, theoretical practices: until recently, psychoanalytic critics have typically been unable to examine either how their own interpretive activity or the aims and assumptions of their academic disciplines are libidinally determined; Marxist critics have frequently been reluctant or unable to analyze how their own projects are historically positioned and produced; and American deconstructive critics rarely examine the logic of their disciplines with the same rigor that they apply to constitutive contradictions in literary texts.

      Lest this observation seem to score a distinctive blow against such contemporary theory, let me state clearly that in this respect most theorists behave like almost everyone else. They do not challenge the territorialization of university intellectual activity or in any way risk undermining the status and core beliefs of their fields. The difference, for theorists, is that this blindness or reluctance often contradicts the intellectual imperatives of the very theories they espouse. Indeed, only a theorized discipline can be an effective site for a general social critique—that is, a discipline actively engaged in self-criticism, a discipline that is a locus for struggle, a discipline that renews and revises its awareness of its history, a discipline that inquires into its differential relations with other academic fields, and a discipline that examines its place in the social formation and is willing to adapt its writing practices to suit different social functions.

      To make these claims, to be sure, is to recognize that the conditions blocking this kind of inquiry are beginning to change. Indeed I would not be empowered to see the institutionalized blindness of theory within academic departments if the discipline of literary studies were not already somewhat open to this kind of self-criticism. As a discipline, perhaps we should now call on the example of the 1960s, when we were at least willing to interrupt the transmission of the canon of English literature to talk about the Vietnam War. If the general 1960s politicization of the university did not produce a real theorizing of academic disciplines, it did place the university’s social responsibilities on the academic agenda. Feminism has done so as well at moments, and Afro-American studies has repeatedly attempted to do so against resistance.

      Yet neither feminism nor Afro-American studies is now well positioned to initiate a general critique of academia’s social mission. Both have been partly isolated by being institutionalized within separate programs. But that is not an insurmountable difficulty and indeed being outside traditional disciplines has an advantage for critique. The more serious problems include some that are internal. In two versions, cultural feminism and Afro-centrism, these movements have fallen under the spell of American exceptionalism and mounted fantasmatic claims to unique redemptive powers. This has made them intolerant of differences of opinion within their own ranks and thus ill suited for dialogue with other versions of feminism and Afro-American studies, let alone other bodies of theory. For these СКАЧАТЬ