(…) the image of a constant human nature independent of time, place, and circumstance, of studies and professions, transient fashions and temporary opinions, may be an illusion, (…) what man is may be so entangled with where he is, who he is, and what he believes that it is inseparable from them. It is precisely the consideration of such a possibility that led to the rise of the concept of culture and the decline of the uniformitarian view of man. (Clifford Geertz , Interpretation of Cultures 35)
Especially in recent times, surrounded as we are by alarming demonstrations of intolerance at the local and global level, there is probably no need to exhume the Medieval Muslim philosopher Averroes to acknowledge that, as he purportedly claimed, “[i]gnorance leads to fear, fear leads to hate and hate leads to violence.” Yet, without overlooking how easily the fear of otherness and of difference can morph into brutality and erase any residue of humanity in the individual, more subtly it can also be argued that precisely fear, when it is not ideological, is the opposite of ignorance rather than a synonym for cowardice. As Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King claims, “Fear is a ruler of mankind. It has the biggest dominion of all. (…) As a molding force it comes only second to Nature itself” (Bellow , Henderson 249). By shaping human intelligence, fear provides awareness of one’s own limits , and of the significance of the limit itself as the constitutive element of our own humanity (Morin , Connaissance 15; 22–24).
In this allegedly new geological epoch—the so-called Anthropocene, in which mankind’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that it has repercussions upon our own species (so much so that the category of Anthropos from the physical point of view, of the subject from the philosophical one, and of the human from the moral and ethical one are deemed at risk of extinction)—one of the greatest challenges is, arguably, how to negotiate between two antithetical conditions: on the one hand, the dissolution of the sense of the limit, brought about by globalization , and, to a great extent, by the pervasiveness of digital culture which dehumanizes us by blurring the line between physical, factual experiences and virtual, fake realities; on the other hand, the necessity (at once need and inevitability) of boundaries, be they the ones that are considered indispensable to individual and collective identities, or, in bleaker scenarios, those that return with a vengeance, as a perverse epilogue to the “no-border” rhetoric or to ideological fanaticism and political manipulation that builds consensus upon fear and rejection of alterity.
Precisely this tension between erasure and reinstatement of confines frames the ongoing debate about the status and role of theory at the outset of the new millennium. The oppositional methodologies of resistance and dissent that in the heyday of “Theory ”’s big names aimed to undermine binarism and normativity are now accused of obliterating historical and cultural boundaries, and of turning into orthodoxies as rigid as the approaches they purported to dismantle. At the same time, the numerous elegies on the supposed “death of Theory ” as a generalizing, comprehensive discursive power resurrect the problem of a “post-” that, while avoiding nostalgic returns to the past or a drastic suppression of it tout court, can rethink the critical discourse acknowledging the temporal and spatial limits of theoretical approaches, and their asymmetries across cultures and hemispheres.
In a vignette by cartoonist and art critic Anthony Haden-Guest that appeared in a 1985 issue of the New Yorker, a father who is introduced to his daughter’s boyfriend discloses the tricky phonetic affinity that made him misunderstand his interlocutor’s occupation: “A theorist? I understood my daughter to say that you were a terrorist!” (Haden-Guest, New Yorker, 1985: 16). If the insinuation of a link between the practice of theory and the exercise of terrorist activity seems to derive from a purely coincidental word pun, all the more hilarious because of the paradoxical association between two semantic fields that are far apart, the message sounds much more provocative in the parodic rephrasing of the vignette caption in Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory . A Very Short Introduction: “‘You’re a terrorist? Thank God. I understood Meg to say you were a theorist’” (Culler 15). What a great relief for the host to realize that his new acquaintance is “only” engaged in intimidating, violent activities, allegedly the lesser evil that hence averts the far greater peril of dealing with a more fearsome subject, namely, the scholar devoted to the threatening enterprise of grappling with abstruse notions about literature and language. The latter is a doubly disquieting endeavor—as we can extrapolate from the ironic comparison with its tamer counterpart—because, allegedly, being a theorist seems at once subversive for society and dangerous for his own safety, as it undermines the intellectual and political establishment.
The vignette aims to corroborate what for Culler is the reason for the widespread hostility to theory as a daunting entity, namely, its “unmasterability” (16). While it promises to offer tools to systematize and understand literary and cultural manifestations more thoroughly, it in fact frustrates readers’ aspirations to proficiency and command because it does not constitute a circumscribed corpus of works or a defined set of concepts, but, rather, an endless process of acquisition and questioning of knowledge. Nevertheless, times have changed significantly since the 1980s. The unattainable mastery that in Culler’s argument thwarted the aspiring theoretician is increasingly taken as a symptom of scholarly fanaticism, and as a synonym for the imperialism of a ubiquitous dogmatic thought.
In the hope of neither terrorizing readers nor continuing theorizing in the service of powerful orthodoxies, this book intends to promote continuing dialog about literary, cultural, and critical theories beyond normative pronouncements and with the awareness of the contextual nature of our production of knowledge. Through a variety of voices from different locations and scholarly domains, it explores ways in which the situatedness and multiplicity of discourses can help transcend paths of cultural hegemony , delineating theoretical and critical landscapes where crossfertilizations of ideas occur across both space and time while underscoring the historical and geographical contingency of any alleged absolute. Before directly elaborating on the structure, content, and scope of the volume (Section 4, “Thought on the Edge ”), this introduction engages with the overarching questions that bring the essays together by addressing the centrality and the implications of situatedness for the specific topics and approaches of each chapter. As it connects representative past and present critical positions that embed the creation of knowledge and meaning within particular geographical, sociohistorical, and cultural domains (Section 1, “From Relativism to Relationism ”), it provides a methodological framework and a discursive context to discuss the post-theoretical scenario in which the book operates. This scenario not only cannot ignore the constructedness of truth that the era of “Theory ” has amply exposed with the alleged aim of undermining ideologies and absolutisms, but also needs to confront the more recent and contested impact of post-truth as an intentionally deceptive discourse that peremptorily disregards factual invalidation (Section 2, “True, False and In-Between”). In contrast to these forms of authoritarian misrepresentation, this introduction and the volume as a whole reclaim the importance of literature for its ability to counteract misleading, reductive falsifications with imaginative multidimensional constructions that open up dialog and interrogate different models of reality and cultural norms (Section 3, “The Truth of the Tale”).
Upon these premises, which this introduction lays out as both topics and procedural steps of its own argumentation, the different subjects, directions, and outcomes that inform the volume challenge ideological closures and disciplinary territoriality by moving on the edge —along limits that bind ideas and values to locations and historical processes, and on thresholds to be traversed, performing change as critical return and constructive renewal.
1 From Relativism to Relationism
Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves. (Hannah Arendt, Human Condition 4)
The so-called “standpoint theories ” keep objectivity as the scope of their investigation but recognize the inescapable role of social and historical location in shaping epistemic agents and the results of their cognitive process, limiting what they are able to know. 1 In her 1988 seminal essay “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective ,” Donna Harraway , dissenting from both a constructivist and a reductionist approach, questions the treatment of “all forms of knowledge (as) parables about objectivity” (Harraway , “Situated” 576) and equates drawing of boundaries to power moves. The alleged rhetorical nature of facts and artefacts privileges no perspective , in her view, and, by reducing any form of truth (including scientific truth) to fiction, it offers no conceptual alternative to the status quo. However, in its “search for translation, convertibility, mobility of meanings and universality” (580), science for Harraway also degenerates into reductionism whenever it reinforces a single language as the standard for (and to the detriment of) other discourses.
The position from which Harraway proposes to undermine the hegemony of a unified master theory managed by an impersonal, all-encompassing “they,” therefore, is the critical empiricism of an embodied “we,” the materiality of marginal others who resist essences through the concreteness and limitedness of their local, contingent subjectivity and cognitive agency. The situated knowledge produced by this “oppositional positioning” (588) should hence also transcend the static dichotomy between mutually exclusive approaches to objectivity. “Subjectivity is multidimensional” (586), Harraway writes, and “[t]he knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole” (586). “Only those occupying the positions of the dominators are self-identical, unmarked, disembodied, umediated, transcendent, born again” (586), while “subjugation is not the ground for ontology” (586) because there is no immediate vision from the subjugated’s standpoint. Positioning requires mediation and “r...