The State of Theory

Richard Bradford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134906741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Written by teachers who are also at the forefront of the development of critical theory, The State of Theory offers a diversity of perspectives, both practical and theoretical, on the current state of literary studies in education.

1
CYBERTHEORY
Bernard Sharratt

OLD TRAINS OF THOUGHT

I have for a long time written satirical and political ballads and indeed performed them. Perhaps when I first began to write ‘serious criticism’, I never really saw a way of hooking that up with such more popular kinds of cultural activity. I would hope that, now, there is in my writing an attempt at a greater convergence between the two. And the same really applies to my novel: I was delighted when somebody said that what they liked about it was that, although it was an intellectual novel, it was not an academic novel…So, once again, to try to write, as they say, creatively but also intellectually would be a desirable stylistic and political goal. I am horrified by the dearth of ideas in contemporary English fiction, which I think has its roots in a certain ingrown English empiricism and commonsensicality, and I think that if there is to be a viable fiction of the left, as well as a theory, then it has to find ways of bringing creative and intellectual discourses together.

I was reading that final paragraph of Terry Eagleton’s recent book, The Significance of Theory, while sitting in a train stalled at Nuneaton station. After I closed the book came the ritual of pondering.

That provincial Midland town of Nuneaton, outside my window, was where the young Marian Evans grew up, on her way to becoming the exemplarily mature George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, the quintessential novel of Leavis’s great tradition, linchpin of EngLit courses for a generation. But she was also author of that major attempt at English intellectual political fiction, Daniel Deronda, selectively excised by the same F.R. Leavis, to be reconstituted and tamed as Gwendolen Harleth. As the train waited, I measured in memory the density of those great Victorian novels, their pace and length, the sense of journey embedded in their very structure, their linear narration and closure, their obvious relation to this very railway system which emerged with them and helped sustain them. Once, long ago, back in the early 1960s, in The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams had analysed the 1840s sales figures for novels sold on W.H.Smith’s new railway kiosks as a way into explaining the ‘structure of feeling’ of a historical moment. I remembered the difficulty, and therefore the excitement, then, of advancing such analyses, entwining material history and critical analysis into a single argument, itself a step on the way to recognising the formal structuring of such fiction by its own modes of production, distribution and consumption. Familiar and now faded modes of theory. The cover of Terry Eagleton’s very first book, endearingly entitled The New Left Church, included a picture of a railway station. Inside was a laconic analysis of how modern railways symbolised both connection and alienation, as a prelude to close ‘practical criticism’ of the structure of feeling in then-contemporary poetry. Very New Left. Very early Marx.

Marian Evans, en route to becoming George Eliot, moved from provincial backwater to national reputation via responsibility for a metropolitan journal, as effective editor of the Westminster Review. The journal as means of intervention and as defining a generation now has a long tradition. I still have a complete set of Scrutiny and a very long run of New Left Review (NLR). In 1968 NLR’s editor Perry Anderson ‘placed’ F.R.Leavis as neatly as he might have done it himself: a map of British culture centred on a displaced totalisation, literary criticism, itself to be displaced by the deliberate pantheon of New Left Books’ continental translations throughout the 1970s. But Anderson’s account left out both creative literature and the hard sciences: it was our ‘concepts of man and society’ that were crucial, and lacking. A severe dose of high theory was peremptorily prescribed. The piece was reprinted recently, in Anderson’s English Questions, but even in its sequel, ‘A culture in counterflow’, Anderson’s map still omits theatre, film and television as well as science. It also relegates to a single footnote the true theoretical successor to NLR itself, the Screen of the 1970s.

In my own university ‘English’ has remained largely uninfluenced by any explicit literary theory, but in the 1970s Kent set up degrees in Marxist studies and women’s studies, a drama degree heavily influenced by Williams and a film studies course staffed by Screen editors. Then in the 1980s came a Lacaninspired MA in psychoanalytic studies, a Board of PostColonial Studies and a BA in a home-grown hybrid, ‘communications and image studies’. Before getting on the train today I went to the railway bookstall, to buy not a novel or NLR but Amiga Format and Byte. Some years ago I stopped teaching literature and literary theory. Now I chair that multidisciplinary degree programme, ‘communications and image studies’, and spend much of my time initiating students into the multimedia possibilities of computers interfacing with video and sound. The long crawl of the intercity train gave me a chance to read the latest computer news and, for a while, The Significance of Theory.

(Several years ago an EngLit colleague turned up for a meeting white-faced. On inquiry his shock turned out to be caused not by news of cancer or redundancy but by an idle moment of calculation: he had just given his five hundredth supervision on Middlemarch.)

MEMORIES OF THEORIES AND PRACTICES

So what now is the significance of theory? Part of the difficulty is knowing what theory is being contrasted with. The older formulations of a polarity of theory and practice tended to be dependent upon the theoretical position one adopted. If theory meant Marxism, the appropriate practice was to do with political revolution, with a definable agency, victim and purpose. If one’s theoretical allegiance was primarily to psychoanalysis, the paradigmatic practice was ultimately the clinical. The chain of links between theory and practice might then stretch somewhat unconvincingly across several layers of other theory/practice couplings, negotiated step by step. At present, however, it seems that theory does not so readily, or guiltily, distinguish itself from practice, but rather assimilates practice into itself: the practice of writing being itself responsible, it can seem, for the construction of agencies and audiences, a self-generating autogestion. If, for Anderson, literary criticism was a substitute totalisation, at least the kind of totalisation involved was in continuity with George Eliot’s: the ambition to make sense of a whole society, historically, sociologically and culturally. Marx could share that arena with Eliot and Marxists could self-persuasively align their functions as intellectuals with the places already prepared for the English ‘cultural critic’. Williams had traced that lineage in his Culture and Society and located himself within it. But an old impasse had always been there.

(At the launch meeting of the May Day Manifesto, in 1968, Williams, as editor, outlined its process of collaborative composition, recalling the long weekend of final paste-up: how the various single-issue analyses and expert local contributions, as they were placed next to each other on his table at home, had finally converged and intertwined, leading unmistakably towards political conclusion and stance, which in turn led, as the argument unfolded and spread along the table, to the inevitable question of agency and strategy …‘There,’ Williams concluded enigmatically, ‘the table ended.’ )

The once-dominant model (call it Model T) of the relation between theory and practice saw theory as a prerequisite and preliminary to practice; theory produced and informed analysis and without analysis no appropriate practice was possible. This model had its roots in the Marxist distinction between the underlying causal forces within a social formation (mapped as the economy) and the more dependent cultural components of that formation (base and superstructure). It was then the task of theoreticians (an aspect of all political activists) to understand those underlying forces, and this allegedly qualified them for correct strategic insight, equipping them with a surer basis for tactical intervention and influence. From The Long Revolution (LR) onwards one can trace in Williams’s work the demolition of the foundations of this whole model. Yet at the same time the very format of his work re-enacted much the same basic model. In LR a theoretical first section was followed by several chapters of history, themselves succeeded by proposals and policies for the present. The implication of this formal arrangement was linear and hierarchieal: establish the theory first, see the historical connections and then move to current practice. The very ambition of the historical chapters indicated one of the persistent problems of this model even within a formal pedagogy: an unavoidably asymptotic curve on the historical material needing to be mastered. Any attempt to build, say, an interpretation of Jacobean drama on the foundations established by historical research rapidly embroiled one in the battles between sharply differing historians; either one’s delayed and provisional contribution became merely that of an amateur onlooker waiting to see who had won, or one offered the analysis of the ‘literature’ also as one more contribution to the historical debate, a conflation of genres and disciplines that could end only with assimilation. A similar problem persisted for any theoretically informed politics: the endlessly procrastinated and asymptotic process of analytical ‘rigour’ that would finally pinpoint the revolutionary moment.

(I once asked a student who had already done a highly specialised MA in Victorian literature, and was now taking a special period paper 1830–70, whether he would prefer to concentrate on one or two authors, say Tennyson or Clough. ‘Does Tennyson come into that period?’ he asked.)

At a broad level, what succeeded this basic model did indeed collapse genre and discipline distinctions, as it did the relation between theory and practice. The initially influential version of this model (call it Model S) was Althusserian in tenor, and its most severe British manifestation signalled the appropriate shift in the very title of its inevitable journal: Theoretical Practice. Central to this still influential family of approaches and positions (theories) has been the notion that a social or discursive formation is at some level intradependently systemic, and that the linchpins of any such system are at root conceptual. In so far as the entire social order is theoretically characterised by one or two key organising principles, by a specific epistemic configuration, or by the spectacle or the simulacrum, any opponent is also recognised as a participant: the situationist is also a spectacle, Baudrillard is undeniably a simulacrum. This stance has one of its roots in Surrealism: the construction of a self-sustaining artefact enjoying a displaced and displacing relation to what one might otherwise have simplemindedly thought of as the real; the surreal offers not so much an alternative world as a disorienting recognition of the genuine oddity of the apparent world. The crucial practice is then a kind of theory, conceptual intervention, yet problematic, even pessimistic, since the very notion of agency tends to dissolve, while the issue of historical change and succession is rendered almost unthinkable. A long sequence of theoretical fashions, from Lévi-Strauss to Lacan, from Foucault to a resuscitated Debord, from Orientalism to Exterminism, can be grouped under this general rubric (Saussurean/structuralist/ semiotic/ situationist, etc.).

Some of Terry Eagleton’s later books bear a somewhat similar relation to this second strand of theoretical model as Williams’s Long Revolution did to the first: a kind of textual counterpositioning. For example, The Function of Criticism is organised as a historical working through of the logic of ‘criticism’, from its inauguration in the public sphere of eighteenth-century journals and coffee houses to the present professionalised ghetto of conference papers and university departments. Yet in so far as the book’s argument demonstrates that there is no longer a public sphere within which and through which criticism can have a political function and effect, the book thereby underwrites its own lack of function and becomes an artefact curiously held up only by its own creation of an audience, a kind of autotelic state of reproduction. Subsequently, and appropriately, The Ideology of the Aesthetic replays at a more overtly philosophical level the trajectory sketched more locally in Williams’s Culture and Society, but both seem over-indebted to a historical moment of mediation that has now passed. Both Marxist and Conservative uses of aesthetics and culture derive, arguably, not so much from Romanticism or German Idealist theory but f rom a phase in mid-Victorian England when the crucial and pragmatic ideological function of ‘culture’ was to help compose a single hegemonic block by reconstituting a common class identity for the successors of the two contending classes of the long revolution of the eighteenth century. (By this time my train was passing through Rugby: faint echoes of Tom Brown’s miserable public school days, of Thomas Arnold and his sad sons.) But as organised democratic demands successfully extended the formal franchise, that reliance on culture as hegemonising cement was transmuted. From being an inward constitutive of a new ruling class self-consciousness and sensibility, ‘culture’ was increasingly offered, in the mass newspapers of the nineteenth century and the mass media of the twentieth, as an external and so-called ‘national heritage’, dangled discriminatingly before an ‘uncultured’ subordinate class but with the promise of incorporation and assimilation. The underlying move here was effectively to separate knowledge from power, to offer an unprecedented dramatising of society freely available to all citizens, manufacturing an imagined community across a national breakfast table or television tray, yet at the same time to restrict any actual engagement in political decision-making to an occasional intervention in the private election booth. Within this process the deeply identificatory effect of those literary devices of totalisation, linearity and closure became sufficiently generalised and incorporated into the popular generic forms of the new media as to make actual literature largely redundant, and as ‘Literature’ became marginalised, so did the critical function of debate around literature. Any radical still operating from within that inherited arena had to retrain as an expert combatant in general semiotic systems. Whereas Williams could, initially, speak from within a secure territorial base and a known community allegiance (not least as a historical novelist of an ambitiously totalising kind), Eagleton had the generationally later task of becoming an assault commando in a cultural no man’s land, a cyberspace cowboy of the intellectual matrix, attacking the shifting theoretical ice of artificially intelligent ideological formations, assaulting the institutionally entrenched defence systems of capitalist academia, hacking into the secret spaces and inner recesses of ideological manufacture, exposing its trade secrets and advance sales strategies. It was invigorating but sometimes seemed like misplaced energy: dammit, why didn’t he write about politics instead?

(I once asked Eagleton why he wanted to write a book on Walter Benjamin. So that the New York Review of Books doesn’t get there first, was the reply.)

POSTBINARIES: FROM THE SUN TO SONY AND SUN

As literary criticism glided from theory to theory to meta-theory, one response argued that the appropriate targets in this sophisticated war of position were not the Metaphysical poets and John Bay...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• 1: CYBERTHEORY
• 2: THEORY AND DIFFICULTY
• 3: IN EXEMPLIFICATION
• 4: LEAVING PARTIES AND LEGACIES: REFLECTIONS ACROSS THE BINARY DIVIDE ON A DECADE OF ENGLISHES
• 5: TOWARDS A GOTHIC CRITICISM
• 6: PARADIGM LOST AND PARADIGM REGAINED
• 7: THE TERGIVERSATIONS OF EMINENT FEMINISTS
• 8: HAVING YOUR ASSUMPTIONS QUESTIONED: A GUIDE TO THE ‘THEORY GUIDES’
• 9: AESTHETICS, CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH
• 10: TEACHING THEORY: IS IT GOOD FOR US?