Hermeneutic  

The Leisure of the Theory Class

by Eric Kenning

Postmodern theorists have transgressively embraced the self-marginalizing functions of their discourse. Yet now, the very possibility of theory has been destabilized by a subversive and viral Other: an unutterable entity that refuses to be subsumed by the familiar technologies of magniloquence.

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Remember Lookism? Throughout the 1990s it was a leading campus thought crime, or more precisely, eye crime and misdemeanor. It meant, usually, glancing at a woman with intent to commit aesthetic evaluation. You don't hear so much about it now, and it could be that we Lookists are no longer being watched. Someone, probably a Whisperist, must have whispered into an administrative ear, pointing out that most women actually like to be discreetly admired by passing strangers and go to some trouble to make sure it happens. In Milan Kundera's recent novel Identity, a Frenchwoman returns from a walk tearful and disconsolate because "Men don't turn to look at me anymore."

While it lasted, Lookism was one of the more eye-catching artifacts of the long struggle of the academic mind against aesthetic pleasure. It seems to have recently ended in the formal surrender of the academics, but in prose style the fight goes on, much like those Japanese soldiers in the jungles of Borneo or Sumatra who continued fighting World War II long after it was over.

Recently I picked up a book called "The Discourse of the Sublime "and found this sublime passage: "[T]he discourse of the sublime might now be seen as requiring the autonomous subject, not as producing it; requiring it to delay as long as possible the recognition that the fractured social subject, the subject as event not continuum, is the 'real' subject posited by its theory. In other words, the discourse of the sublime produces in theory an autonomous subject position in order to negate the subject agent it in fact confronts 'in practice,' in the real. This practice it confronts includes, of course, itself, the theory of the sublime." I like that "In other words."

The book, published in 1989, was an early warning signal of a new academic embrace of the sublime and the beautiful, which have become hot topics in the kind of theory-infested conferences, seminars, panels, colloquia, courses, dissertations, and books that not long ago were assuring us that beauty was merely a socially constructed figment of our Eurocentric, phallocentric, bourgeois, patriarchal imaginations. It sacralized the hegemonic surveillance of the Male Gaze. It devalorized the transgressive narrativity of postcolonial alterity. In the academic world, as in the contemporary art world, beauty has for decades been an illegal alien, leading a furtive, marginal, undocumented existence.

But if aesthetic pleasure has become an academic Cinderella story, or at least a Cinderella narrative, the new theoretical embrace of it is ambivalent as well as smothering. In the 18th century the sublime (majestic, awe-inspiring, melancholy, dark) and the beautiful (regular, smooth, delicate, elegant, bright) were seen by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, who wrote treatises on the distinction, as contrasting but complementary aesthetic qualities. Now partisans of the sublime brush off beauty as hopelessly fussy and frowsy and just so utterly two years ago and unchic: "Whereas the concept of beauty seems outmoded — passé, even — in relation to the current practices of criticism in the arts, sublimity has suddenly become fashionable" (Paul Crowther, "The Kantian Sublime"). But there are also fierce partisans of beauty, like Elaine Scarry of Harvard who, in "On Beauty and Being Just," recoils from the sublime as "an aesthetic of power," or Wendy Steiner of the University of Pennsylvania who, in "Venus in Exile," finds in the sublime, as set forth by the meticulous, mild-mannered, and celibate Kant, a bullying, chest-pounding machismo responsible for all the ugly shock tactics of modern and postmodern art. If this kind of thing catches on, the American Empire will soon be divided between the Sublime Party and the Beautiful Party, just as the Byzantine Empire was divided between two political-theological factions, the Blues and the Greens, originally rival teams at the chariot races.

It's clear that the impulse behind Lookism, the fundamental academic impulse to translate every pleasure into political sour grapes, hasn't entirely disappeared. Neither has the itch for obscurity, even though some of the new aesthetic books, like those by Scarry and Steiner, are clearly written. While Basque and the languages of remote aboriginal tribes have yielded up their secrets to linguists and anthropologists, the dense, twisted tongue still widely spoken in the hermit kingdom of academic theory has never been satisfactorily studied or explained. There isn't even a dictionary.

In 1998 the theorist Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has a cultish following among academic feminists, was awarded first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature, and this was the winning sentence: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the re-articulation of power."

Butler and other postmodernist theorists have defended these labyrinthine sentences as if they were laboratories, arguing that, like theoretical physicists, they are dealing with difficult and elusive concepts, and so, like theoretical physicists, they are hard to understand. But in 1996 a theoretical physicist, Alan Sokal, famously upended them with a banana peel called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," a pastiche of pseudoscientific postmodernist nonsense that he submitted to the then-fashionable journal Social Text. The editors, encumbered by their thick theoretical burkas, fell for the hoax and solemnly published it.

The University of Chicago classics scholar Martha Nussbaum, alluding to "the thick soup of Butler's prose" in a 1999 New Republic review of several of her books, noted that her "obscurity creates an aura of importance. . . . It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding." This is on the right track. It's a trick, as Nussbaum pointed out, of the more oracular sort of philosophical trade, offering incense and initiation rather than argument. But she didn't see that all that exquisite obscurity is also a self-affirming, class-consolidating social ritual, like an annual charity ball or sailing regatta.

Theory gives people with nothing to say a way of saying it at interminable length. It's a comfortable, privileged, tenured, and ceremonial existence, with long vacations, sabbaticals, and travel allowances to get the theorists from one conference to another, where they preen, drink, and mate. The fretwork elaborations of syntax and vocabulary that go with the vogue for theory are ultimately ornamental status indicators, like the elaborate lace worn centuries ago by members of the European aristocracy and limited to their class alone by sumptuary laws.

It's tempting to think that theory will eventually just fade away. Boredom is lethal for social and political regimes. It subverted the old regimes of Europe and their jaded aristocracies, and, more recently, Marxist regimes were done in not just by their economic inertia and everyday oppression but also by the devotion of their ruling classes to a monotonous, torpid, stolid Stalinoid style. So boredom should logically cause the collapse of the academic theory regime, whose prose productions are as deadly as the full text of a Soviet Politburo member's six-hour speech on the Five-Year Plan for Cement Quota Fulfillment in the Kazakh S.S.R. But it probably won't. Theory seems to have become an incurable academic rash.

The theorists themselves have for years been announcing the end of theory, or admitting its lack of real-world consequences, but they just keep doing it, they can't help it, there's nothing else to do. The literary theorist Jonathan Culler has defined "post-theory" as "the theoretical discussions animated by the question of the death of theory." Theory-class celebrities like Culler, Butler, Andrew Ross, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Antonio Negri, and Homi K. Bhabha continue to draw large academic crowds, publish unreadable books, and occupy well-upholstered academic chairs.

Individual theories, like all fashions, have a short shelf life. Hardly anyone in the theory mall is hawking deconstruction now, and nothing could be more old-hat than the New Criticism that once reigned supreme over every English department in the land. The New Historicism, a heavily advertised novelty maybe a decade ago, is already gathering dust. But theory itself staggers on, nourishing itself on its own obituaries. Still, maybe beauty and the sublime, which seem to exist somewhere out there beyond the Text, where there's supposed to be Nothing, will gradually have a subversive, genuinely transgressive effect on the theory class.

Scientists tell us that chimpanzees can be observed looking intently at beautiful sunsets. But far more amazing is the thought that even the clannish primates known as postmodernists are now probably gazing wistfully at the evening horizon, trying to make up their theoretical mind. Does a sunset merely valorize the hegemonic essentialist discourse of "day" and "night"? Or is it, on the contrary, a liberating self-deconstructing sublime narrative of postdiurnal Otherness? WWDD? (What Would Derrida Do?) Beauty may yet make monkeys, or even Lookists, out of all of them.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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