The Future of Theory

After a very busy 20th century, the critical theory is in a bind. For years, university departments and superstar professors have made their reputations on a series of Big Ideas like psychoanalysis, structuralism and post-colonialism. With each new paradigm, it brought the other humanities into its orbit — history, architecture, and music have all felt its influence. At the same time, Theory (big “T”) became more and more removed from public discourse. It was obscured from mere mortals by insider language and obscure citations. Witness the Postmodernism Generator, which produces academic texts from randomly generated but plausibly ridiculous snippets of text. Perhaps mercifully, the Big Ideas have all since fallen out of favor. The wane is perhaps best illustrated by the “Social Text” hoax, in which an NYU physicist managed to get a completely bogus paper published in a prominent journal by adopting en vogue language and flattering the editors. Despite some initial enthusiasm over the completely unremarkable Empire, there is little hope for a new Big Idea that can serve as the framework for published papers and tenures.

Critical Inquiry brought more than two dozen of the most prominent humanities professors to the University of Chicago for a symposium on the future of critical theory. The result of the symposium was remarkable: a complete rejection of Big Ideas and of critical theory as a discipline. In response to an audience question comparing the relevance of Noam Chomsky’s work to that of more formal theorists, Sander L. Gilman of the Unversity of Illinois at Chicago declared that Noam Chomsky and “most criticism…is a poison pill.” Stanley Fish followed up: “I wish to deny the effectiveness of intellectual work.” There was some defense of theory as an intellectual exercise, but the consensus was that theory has no hope of being relevant outside the academy.

This is simultaneously liberating and terrifying. On one hand, there is the dark spectre of anti-intellectualism in wartime. Much of the conference was devoted to the rise of the intellectual right, the impotence of the left, and the war. On top of that, the admission that pure theory cannot animate art or politics — not that it may not be effective now, but might later. Rather, the agreement that critical theory as a discipline is terminally useless in the real world. There is an underlying assumption here, which is that an intellectual pursuit must have manifestation in the real world, or in daily life. History tells us that this anti-intellectualism is dangerous ground.

On the other hand, this marks a sea change in the academy’s relationship with the rest of the world. Perhaps to compete with the “hard” sciences, Big Ideas employed specialized language and intellectual acrobatics that would make a scientist blush. Reading an analysis of the Bronte Sisters was a baroque web of insider language and references. The punchline is that in the end, the humanities are not the sciences. The humanities defy many of the rules that govern scientific inquiry — subjectivity is everywhere, and there is no litmus test for Plato’s Republic. One can only hope that this insight will convince theorists to shed the artifice, and instead apply their undeniable mental powers to their real purpose: advancing our understanding of the world.