What's Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory - Book Review

Style, Summer, 2001 by Mark Bauerlein

In contrast to Warner's partisan descriptions, Berube's "The Return of Realism and the Future of Contingency" purports to reach across party lines. An avowed antifoundationalist, Berube appeals to "the broad constituency of left intellectuals, journalists, and activists that has been so alarmed and threatened by varieties of poststructuralism" (137). This is an admirable goal, and the clarity and agility of his prose bolsters Berube's promise of evenhandedness. But one aspect of his argument biases the discussion: the anecdotal evidence taken from Berube's own experience. The foundationalist/antifoundationalist debate gets processed through a University of Illinois event pitting Berube against Alan Sokal. The realist/constructionist debate runs through a question Berube asked John Searle at an Illinois lecture. The genetics/environment debate is framed by Berube's own Downs-syndrome son. These are all skillful, readable episodes, but they are too local to draw listeners from across the aisle. Berube aims to "devise rhetorical strategies of persuasion" (153), but such strategies are ineffective when they smack too much of the strategic, and when the audience does not sense a genuine truth claim behind them--precisely the claim antifoundationalists shy away from.

One wonders why the editors chose not to ask the contributors to revise their submissions, to take into account a diverse readership and incorporate the other side into their compositions. Indeed, they could have pointed to the other essays in the book as more measured examples of criticism. Halley's "'Like Race' Arguments" judiciously ponders whether arguments against race discrimination properly apply to cases of sex discrimination. Jonathan Culler's conclusion is a summary statement by a first-generation U.S. theorist reflecting on how times have changed. Like many such routines, it mentions many developments but criticizes none, before ending with a feeble proposal to "reground the literary in literature, to go back to actual literary works" (290). Nevertheless, Culler's piece does forthrightly attempt to examine the concept "theory" in today's intellectual climate. Finally, John Brenkman's "Extreme Criticism" is the strongest theoretical piece in the book, the only one that focusses on the politics of l iterary theory. His remarks on the "exuberant ignorance" of cultural studies, the social aspects of Kant's "disinterestedness," the "endless dithering over agency" (124), and the political ineffectuality of the Foucauldian body, the Lacanian mirror-stage, and the Althusserian interpellated subject all have bite, and bespeak a critic whose horizon extends beyond his own party.

But the editors decided to leave the other essays alone. Perhaps they felt that the egotism of Spivak and Levinson was immune to editorial suggestion, or that the commitments of Warner, Nunokawa, and Berube were just, and so required no balancing. More likely, the editors did not care about the argumentative and stylistic drawbacks of the contributions, for the editors' own five-page preface bears many of the same mistakes. It indulges the tiresome habit of putting ordinary words inside scarequotes: "about," "political," "apply," "contexts," "settle," "left." Instead of framing issues analytically, it resorts to a lazy interrogative mode: the fifth paragraph contains eight questions, the eigth has three, the final paragraph has five, most of them absurdly inflated (e.g., "Are we, as a profession, ghosted by a formalism that never was?"). It offers the erroneous premise that deconstruction "emerged" from New Criticism. It recounts theory/antitheory debates in an overwrought emotive vocabulary of "fear," "cont amination," "purging," "specter," and "panicking." And its leading positive assertion is wholly banal: "literary scholars bring insightful forms of reading to bear upon social and political texts that have great relevance for the course of our collective lives" (xi-xii).