Two Cheers For Theory?

James Tussing on Literary Theory And Its Discontents

Dear Republic,

We’re playing around with different formats within The Republic of Letters. This piece is the first installment of a commissioned exchange on Literary Theory — i.e. what is it? is it valuable? useful? or just unbelievably annoying? James Tussing, who is really fucking smart, makes the case here for the deep value of Theory — although, as befits the topic, with a great deal of ambiguity.

Tomorrow’s the deadline for pieces on “What Has Happened To Literary Men?” — to be sent to republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com

-The Editor

TWO CHEERS FOR THEORY?

Nearly everyone who writes about literature here on Substack seems to hate literary theory (or Theory). It sometimes feels like a survivor’s network for victims of clerical sex abuse. You hear a thousand versions of the same trauma story. Somebody’s love of literature or writing was nearly snuffed out by a professor or TA who was uninterested in the classic text a class was supposedly studying. Instead, they spouted a bunch of nonsensical abstruse jargon that had nothing to do with the book, or they attempted to judge and dismiss book and author on the basis of brain-dead social justice politics of the sort that a high school student could have picked up on Tumblr. Or they combined both approaches. The broad church to which our Theorists-with-a-capital-T belong, the academic humanities, is in a state of advanced decomposition. My job in this post is to defend this corrupt, decaying Church to the survivor network. I will unctuously apologize for what went wrong, smarmily imply that some of the stories people tell are exaggerated, and piously explain how these regrettable abuses and distortions keep us from appreciating the true message of Theory.

What is Theory? People use the word to describe a cultural transfer that happened, mostly in the 1970s, between France and the English-speaking world, principally the United States. During the period from the end of WWII till the 1980s or thereabouts, there was an extraordinary cultural ferment in French academia. Something like the anarchic creative spirit that had characterized French visual art before the war took hold in disciplines like philosophy, sociology, psychology, and ethnology. (In spite of the prominence of Roland Barthes and René Girard, the study of literature was not at the center of this trend.) As was the case with modernist visual art, the results were often extremely pretentious. Jacques Derrida’s Glas opposes two columns of text, one by G. W. F. Hegel and the other by the writer Jean Genet, with quotations and comments by Derrida inserted in the margins. It is inspired, in part, by James Joyce, and it fails because, unlike Joyce, Derrida is not nearly as funny as he thinks he is.

In spite of many misfires and a lot of pretension, I suspect that the best of the French writing that inspired Theory will endure, even if its readership going forward may not be very large. (The common reader can certainly get a lot out of works like The Second Sex, Tristes Tropiques or Madness and Civilization.) It will endure for a simple, New Criterion-ish reason. Picasso could subvert the traditions of Western painting so convincingly because this tradition was the very air he breathed. Products of an elite humanist education, the French progenitors of Theory knew the Western tradition that they sought to deconstruct as well as anyone ever has. Derrida’s writing about Plato or Rousseau resembles traditional scholarship on these two figures about as much as Picasso’s paintings of Dora Maar resemble photographs of Dora Maar. Scholars of Plato and Rousseau can always learn something from Derrida’s provocations. As for his celebrity, I suppose you had to be there.

The American champions of Theory often did not have the sort of education (particularly in philosophy) that their French masters took for granted. Even when they did, the wrote for a different public. What had a confident subversive panache in Paris too often became rote and tedious when it crossed the Atlantic and was absorbed into literature programs. (The postmodernist shtick eventually became rote and tedious in Paris as well; no style can stay fresh forever.) This, as I see it, is more or less what went wrong with French Theory.

Beyond reflections on these once-trendy French trends, however, you will often hear more general complaints about the application of philosophy or of theory with a small “t” to literary criticism. Literature, some partisans of common sense tell us, conveys Subtle Moral Nuances, Truths of Experience that Philosophical Abstraction cannot capture. This kind of objection, in itself, is as abstract as any theory, and often conceals a theory of its own. Theory-heavy writing at its best — Nietzsche writing about Wagner, Foucault writing about Velazquez, Stanley Cavell writing about King Lear or The Lady Eve — is extremely concrete. We have been theorizing about literature since the days of Aristotle and Horace. When our common-sensical critics insist that Middlemarch is aesthetically superior to Harry Potter, they are informed by a theory of literature, often one inspired by a mix of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Matthew Arnold. So perhaps it does no harm to try to make the theories underlying our common sense explicit.

Or perhaps it does. Parisian stylishness aside, I think that much of what was most serious in capital-T Theory can be traced to German Romanticism (a connection that the capital-T Theorists Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy tried to make in the 1970s). I think the same can be said of Arnold, and even in a way of Eliot. These writers are all influenced by the Romantics, but tracing chains of influence is the cheapest game in scholarship. Is it interesting to try to understand Theory, or literature in general, from a Romantic perspective? In Portrait of a Lady, we first meet Isabel Archer in Albany, New York. She is “trudging over the sandy plains of a history of German thought” while the rain falls “heavily.” The history of German thought does Isabel little good, and perhaps my little history of Theory will reek too much of grad school to interest people with better things to read. Yet Romanticism seems to be having a moment now, so I’ll give it a try.

The early German Romantics were attempting to make sense of the philosophical revolution begun by Immanuel Kant. Probably the best effort to summarize this revolution in a slogan comes from the philosopher Sebastian Rödl: the key thought of German Idealism is that “self-consciousness, reason, and freedom are one.” For Kant, our ability to produce art was a priceless empirical sign of the fact that we are free, but the nature of freedom was something that a philosopher could deduce a priori. The philosophical breakthrough to Romanticism was arrived at collectively by a group of poets and thinkers who gathered mostly in the university town of Jena under the Prospero-like influence of Goethe. The key move was first made in print by Friedrich Joseph Schelling, who in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) declared that art was the “organon” of philosophy. This meant, effectively, that the unity of reason, freedom, and self-consciousness (what the Romantics called the Absolute) could not be deduced abstractly. Instead, we could only know what it meant to be free by seeing our freedom depicted in works of art. The history of art, Schelling declares, is thus in a sense the history of human freedom.

Friedrich Schelling at the dawn of time

What is only a suggestion in the System of Transcendental Idealism was soon made concrete in detailed lecture-courses on the history of art, of which A. W. Schlegel offered the first. Many others would imitate Schlegel, including Schelling himself and eventually Hegel. (All of them, in their different ways, were reacting to Wilhelm Meister and Faust: A Fragment, trying to tease out the history of art implicit in Goethe’s work.) These German lecture-courses would in turn influence Mme. de Staël and Coleridge, helping to launch European Romanticism. Each Romantic thinker told the story differently, but a few main points most have in common can be summarized non-technically. If art is a form of representation that allows us to grasp freedom or the Absolute, the history of art is the history of artists gradually coming to understand the true nature of their vocation. Art has its origins in religious ritual, and the earliest forms of art aspire to a sort of anonymity, simply bodying forth the religious beliefs of a community. Art took its first steps towards Romanticism when artists sought to be recognized for their individual styles. Whether the Romanticization of art meant its gradual secularization, or whether it was a move towards a new form of religion, is unclear.

What does all this have to do with Theory? Theory, I think, grows out of the useful circular effort to explain a given culture (what Hegel called a “shape of spirit”) on the basis of the works of art it produced, and at the same time to understand works of art in terms of the culture from which they emerge. Works of art are manifestations of freedom that help us understand what makes it difficult to be free in the time and place in which they are produced. The most bravura effort to use art to understand society by means of art and vice-versa is surely Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a work whose hermetic fascination and baroque obscurity no later work of Theory ever quite matched. The Phenomenology is not a Romantic book, however. Hegel uses Antigone to explain the contradictions of Greek society and Rameau’s Nephew to explain the contradictions of pre-Revolutionary France. But Hegel is reluctant to use contemporary works of art to explain the contradictions of his own society, because he seems to think that these contradictions were beginning to fade away. Marxist literary theory — without which French Theory would be unthinkable, although they are not the same thing — starts from the intuition that Hegel was mistaken about some of his own deepest insights, and that our society still contains contradictions that art reveals in a way no other facet of human experience can.

Yet a tension haunts Marxist literary theory. Are works of art interesting in themselves, as sources of self-knowledge? Or is their task to guide us in the right political direction? Does revolutionary theory tell us what sort of society we should aspire to build — something like the “end of history” attributed to Hegel, but situated in the future — with art serving for illustration and propaganda? Any Marxist scholar worth their salt can explain why this is a tendentious way of putting the question, why neither Marx nor any interesting Marxist theorist — not even Brecht — thought in quite this way. Uninteresting Marxist theorists, or apparatchiks in state socialist dictatorships, are another story. The temptation to understand art as either propaganda or illustration of the ideologically correct position haunts this tradition. (Other traditions are not immune from the same temptation, of course.)

Sometime between the mid-1970s and 1990s, the utopian horizon of revolution that had guided Marxist literary theory ceased to be convincing. One Marxist response to this disorienting development was to scour the cultural artifacts of the present and recent past for traces of utopian longing, something that Fredric Jameson did with taste and sensitivity. Jameson is worth reading because, although he would not put it quite this way, he respects what the German Romantics called the autonomy of the work of art, the power of art practiced for its own sake to give us needed orientation in an otherwise mysterious world. For Jameson it went without saying that the sources of orientation included the work of artists he found politically unsympathetic, from Wyndham Lewis to David Lynch.

I am not a literary scholar, and I don’t keep up with Jameson’s field. Yet it is clear, to say the least, that not everyone from Jameson’s neck of the intellectual woods shares his curiosity and open-mindedness. Bruce Robbins, a fellow-traveler of his, recently wrote a revoltingly pompous review of Edwin Frank’s book on the twentieth century novel for The Baffler. Robbins urges readers not to seek for something as banal as self-awareness, the putting-into-question of previously held moral commitments, from the novels they read. Instead of questioning their moral certainties, “[we] academics,” he assures his readers, will often “justify our labors by proudly discovering some ideological flaw in the books we’re discussing.” By ideological flaws, the review makes clear, Robbins means deviations from the political positions you’d expect a reader of The Baffler to share. Thomas Mann is declared politically suspect, and V. S. Naipaul’s fiction is excoriated in a paragraph devoted entirely to Naipaul’s political opinions. The Trinidadian author is absurdly presented as a typical mouthpiece of English aristocratic disdain for bourgeois vulgarity. (Even if this were true, it would put Naipaul in the line of Lampedusa, Joseph Roth, and Balzac, artists whom Marxist literary criticism knows how to appreciate.) Robbins instead advises his readers to get “better-grounded anti-commercialism” from, inter alia, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. I dwell on Robbins’ essay because it seems to confirm the suspicion that Theory is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo devised to justify the hunt for ideological flaws. We academics — including Marxists, capital-T Theorists, and holders of Baffler-approved political opinions — are not all as far gone as this.

Of course, capital-T Theory is not exclusively or even predominantly Marxist. The French Theory of the 1960s, which English-speaking graduate students absorbed so readily in the ‘70s and ‘80s, was much influenced by the three thinkers Paul Ricoeur called the “masters of suspicion.” Marx was one, but the other two, Freud and Nietzsche, were of a different political complexion, and their influence often predominated. A recurring problem with the masters-of-suspicion approach, as has often been noted, is that the Theorist was tempted to claim a kind of extraterritoriality. I can argue that a work of art is explained by the artist’s petit-bourgeois upbringing or by her subconscious penis envy. My argument will be plausible if my interpretation of her work is persuasive. If I claim that the science of historical materialism, or of psychoanalysis, or of (God help us) structural linguistics makes my interpretation more authoritative than the artist’s conscious intentions, however, I am cheating. Surely the Theorist is motivated by the same mixture of conscious and unconscious motives as the artist. (The major post-structuralist thinkers all see this problem, but they often respond to it by muddying the waters.) Yet artists are often the first to admit that they do not fully understand the source of their creativity, and a less imperious, more dialogic version of Theory has often proven helpful to them. I’ll close with an example.

Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which introduced the world to the concept of the male gaze, is a quintessential work of Theory. It draws heavily on the technical psychoanalytic vocabulary of perhaps the most abstruse of all French Theorists, Jacques Lacan. Yet the idea of the male gaze has floated free of this context and entered common parlance in a simplified but not wholly inaccurate form. Our society — notably through film, fashion, and advertising — trains women to be looked at, to expect to be partly passive objects of male desire. It expects men to look, to be the active subjects of desire. A more just society would not accept this inequality of gender roles. We can take a step in the right direction by making films that resist the male gaze and subverts its expectations. There is clearly something to this. But there is also a short line from pop-Mulvey to the sort of check-your-brain-at-the-door feminist culture criticism we all know from TV recaps, over-literal applications of the Bechdel test, and the demand for Strong Female Characters of Color in Disney movies. Mention of the male gaze also irresistibly provokes the objection that women don’t dress in feminine or sexy ways just to attract male attention. And why should feminists object if they chose to do so?

Unsurprisingly, debates about the male gaze often ignore Mulvey’s engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis. For this reason, however, they tend to miss the deeper point Mulvey was trying to make about the gaze’s impersonality, the way it suggests to all of us (non-heterosexuals included) a set of roles or poses that we can negotiate with or try to subvert but cannot simply avoid or ignore. One artist who did not miss Mulvey’s point is the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall. His 1979 Picture for Women, a manifesto-like work that set the tone for much of his later oeuvre, is almost an illustration of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Yet Wall was not led by Mulvey’s essay to reject the art of the past as inherently problematic, or to reject the autonomy of art as a romantic illusion, a gesture he felt his Conceptualist peers were all too ready to make. Without a hint of parody, Wall instead tries to remake for his own time a meditation on the male gaze by an earlier male artist: Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.

Picture for Women by Jeff Wall

Picture for Women appears to be the photograph of a mirror that reflects two individuals in a brightly lit classroom at night. We see the reflection of a man (Wall himself) who is looking into the mirror at the reflection of a woman. At the same time, the man is pressing the cable release of a camera that is reflected in the center of the mirror, presumably taking the picture we are looking at. The woman at first glance seems to be looking out of the picture at us. Any erotic charge is sublimated. The two figures are clearly posing, and they seem somewhat uncomfortable, displaying what in a gallery note Wall called the “restless passivity” provoked by fluorescent lighting. Wall is the active figure, moving to look at the woman and pressing the cable release. Yet the image is captured by the somewhat menacing camera, which seems to offer the implicit (false) promise to record what really happened, not what the artist wants to see. The woman is passive but, we realize, she is not reciprocating his gaze or ours, but looking at the camera’s reflection. Wall has said that Picture for Women is “a kind of classroom lesson on the mechanisms of the erotic.” It has provided something like a grammar for his subsequent efforts to revive the European tradition of the tableau, to use photography to continue the tradition of what Baudelaire called the painting of modern life.

I don’t blame people who roll their eyes at expressions like “the male gaze” or “the patriarchal unconscious,” and who are exasperated at the suggestion that they will understand the serious meaning behind Mulvey’s ideas if they read Lacan. They may roll their eyes at Wall’s photo, too, but I don’t. And since I retain the Romantic belief that art is the organon of philosophy (or Theory), Wall’s photo is one of the best arguments I know for why the Theorists of the ‘70s were not simply blowing smoke.

James Tussing is a relapsing academic political theorist. He lurks on Substack at

Secret Squirrel

.