Ok, so the only screen I’m watching is the computer screen and this post is decidedly off-topic, but this is something I think about and wrestle with a lot and am curious what those of you who would probably be considered products of an elite university education think about this article.
I’d have to agree with the main ideas of the article. Many graduate students make the serious mistake of considering graduate school as a kind of open-ended intellectual exploration, when, in fact, what it is primarily is a kind of “middle-management” training program whose main role is to reproduce its current structure and to guarantee that the students it “places” take up a suitably functional role as bureacrats of knowledge. As I’m discovering in the job search, even people who might want to resist that role have to start playing along to some degree as early as possible. Look around at dissertations and conferences–even the titles of papers have a generic format (a rhythm no less!) designed to indicate their obedience to institutional rules. I don’t believe the fading obsession with a highly limited groups of texts and concepts called “theory” has done much to undermine the deep structures of universities and departments. Nor do I believe the implications of theory centerpieces like Foucault and Derrida were ever really seriously attended to (or even read, as we were never much encouraged to go beyond a kind of “greatest hits” approach to theory), except as ways to supplement the old-fashioned analyses of literature and to obtain instantly a kind of political relevance that spared most people the labor of real political articulation for themselves. Now professionalized academics could be spared reflecting on the huge division between the university and most of society by pointing to theory as proof that their work was somehow inherently “political” and “progressive.” I saw in the space of my own graduate career the rise of cultural studies, its self-involved failed attempts at challenge and its total decline.
In any case, I share your obsessions with these concerns. A way to make it directly relevant to this blog is perhaps to reflect also on the role of “film theory” and the various approaches to popular texts current at universities. Are they more than self-involved? Are they suffering the same fate as literary theory? Does the university really have anything to offer concerning the popular or…anything?
I’ll take a stab at my pal Mike who didn’t give a “fuck” about M$B but found it interesting to talk about from a theoretical perspective. I like theory (though I often feel as if I am sampling from a greatest hits crib sheet–and no one taught THEORY at CU so I basically taught myself so I’m also feeling somewhat doubly insecure) and I do use it and not just because I feel I have to (I’ve been in a lucky position to never have to feel as if I am being measured by how well I talk such talk). Then again, in my discipline I try to focus on how such ideas might be translated into something that can actually be put onto the stage–theory into action so to speak, which can be fun if you are a director messing around with a canonical text. But it seems to me that the only way you can “play” around with Melville or Hitchcock or Robbe-Grillet is to write something to be published in journal X or delievered at conference Y. Does the university really have anything to offer concerning the popular . . . that’s a great question.
Actually, Jeff, I didn’t “give” a fuck about M$B.
I think we ought to unmuddy the language used here, a bit. There is theory a–the general methodological and conceptual frameworks which shape reading–that everyone does.
There is theory b–the dense academically-profitable industry which this author, and more concisely and astutely Michael in his post–laments.
There is theory c–which is, if possible, the materials read in the above industry, which can be seen both as producers and products of said industry, but which can also be read in relation to (and as useful producer and product of) theory a.
Do I find theory b a drag, in every sense of the word? (A force resisting forward motion, a dull deadening experience, a set of disguises which one puts on to alter identity.) Yes. I can recall any number of instances–heck, could re-experience them, at any number of conferences–where parroting of “professional” scripts derails any real conversation or human interaction. And while it’d be fun to take potshots at ritual abusers of this language (and hear I sing “I think her name is Debra” in my loudest Beck falsetto), I’m as guilty as the average academic (or human being) of feeling nervous and falling back on pretenses which I hope make “me” seem really important, too.
I also find that such homogenization–such commodification in the ostensible service of professionalism–is endemic in every field, industry, set of practices. I heard lawyers stick to jargonized, unreflective script when talking “expansively” about the law and when digging into the actual practice of reading/writing a legal opinion. I heard and saw similar pre-packaged speech and action when I was in the Peace Corps, except the shit slung there was about “justice” and “development.” What the article ought to lament is NOT that theory is deadening and a game we ought to reject or rethink. Instead, the writer’s focus ought to be on how methods ossify, how theories get institutionalized, how institutions fit into a commerce of ideas and idea-agents. In short, how the “business” of education substantively destroys actual critical thought.
But people have been post-theory since 1982, before anyone was really theory. I find this move to declare the death of theory, even when concentrated on theory b, suspiciously reactionary. Theory (b), after all, is/was a refutation of principles and ideas shaping the study of Literature (b, probably, following the above taxonomy), an equally commodified and ossified and dumbass-ified approach to teaching. I’m not that nostalgic; I doubt things were every good for theory, and I know things weren’t better before it came along. I also know that Michael Berube–probably in the Chronicle, and definitely elsewhere–has written far more incisively and corrosively about how this refutation of theory fails to address the real uses and practices for teaching theory (not nearly as endemic as suggested in the article cited in Jeff’s post), the real utility of theory done well, or the real histories of cultural debate around “theory” and “literature” which still motivate many of these arguments.
And while theory b may have grand ideas about its impact, I am interested in theory a, because I’m a teacher. I never thought cultural studies would bring down the movie industry, or alter the fabric of American life. I assumed that it would give me and my students new tools for critical reflection and — hopefully — critical action. I’m an educator. I use theory c to open up extensive and reflexive examinations of theory a; I push explicitly to tie theory a to cultural practices, to local and larger (national, global) communities, and blah blah inspirational blah.
Now, Michael and Jeff will–smartly, and rightly–point out how crucial it is to be seen as a producer of “theory b” out on the market. True, at many gigs, at least at the many many of us would want, shit sells and ambiguous idiosyncratic critical reflection/attention is hard to package. But that’s also a different kind of essay.
I guess I kind of nodded when reading the article in the Chronicle, but mostly thought of better and more complex versions of that argument, like Michael’s. But even Michael’s doesn’t unsettle my approach, which has always been primarily concerned with a vision of theory more expansive and uncertain and useful than the institutionalized version. I read the stuff mostly on my own, too, and found/find it invigorating and deadening in about the same ratio for those responses to the lit I read, the movies I see.
It’s always hard to follow Mike (I wish he would post his response to The Chronicle), but I did want to point to something that he wrote earlier this year that still pings around this blog. When Mike admitted that Haneke’s Time of the Wolf made him weep, we didn’t seem to know what do with such an utterance so we transformed his confession into an inside joke, utlizing it as shorthand for so many ironic rejoinders. That comment, however, lives on for me, because, in the end, I too desire to make an emotional connection to a film or play or novel. Certainly I want to be entertained, provoked, upended, and held captive. I like sensation and thrill, the potency of sentimental gestures (cheap music, if you will), but mostly I want to be surprised. I don’t want a film to lecture at me or preach to me (which is why I often feel like a poser when I teach Brechtian theory but am truly ecstatic when I get to talk about the final moments of Mother Courage), but if I learn a little bit along the way then great. And when a film or novel or tv show is able to move me, then I might want to step back away from it and analyse it or theorize and try to figure out what makes it work. I fear I often put the cart before the horse in my classes and my scholarship (however negligible such scholarship may be), and that worries me. But my daughter is hungry and hunger seems to trump theory every time, so I’m going to feed her.