Just so we don’t use up time on this on Friday: you’ll already have some sense of what I’d say to these (rather flat) Qs. Apologies for the length and for getting this on-line so late.
Q: Which French theorists and theories do you draw on in your work? Why? Where did you come into contact with their ideas?
I’ve always been interested in the politics of culture. On one level, this means that I’ve had an interest in the ways in which cultural forms (literature, film, contemporary art, etc.) engage with politics through their content or through the construction and imagination of new aesthetic forms. But I’ve been perhaps more fascinated by how the category of culture itself (as distinct from other parts of social life) and the practices, dispositions, forms of training, modes of behaviour, etc. associated with it contain their own politics—structurally, institutionally, and historically. A lot (maybe all) of the posts for this week’s meeting speak sharply and strongly to this aspect of the politics of culturs.
I can think of two thinkers from the French tradition whose ideas I make heavy use of: Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. I first came across the ideas of Foucault as an undergraduate and have slowly worked my way through his most important work in the intervening years; I’m most fascinated by the set of lectures he gave near the end of his life at the College de France. I studied the work of Bourdieu in my PhD, and was interested enough in his ideas to help organize a conference on the use of Bourdieu’s ideas in art, literature and culture. Both thinkers offer me models of how to ask questions about assumed categories and to think about paradigm shifts produced by changes in social institutions and structures of knowledge. I see Bourdieu as more of a German than French thinker, as he places himself in a lineage of sociological thinking that has origins in the work of Weber and Simmel, and which mostly dropped out of France until he revived it.
The French thinkers who most intrigue me at the moment are Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, who have each published numerous books and essays that fit my general area of scholarly interest.
Q: Could you draw a map of the intellectual lineage or tradition within which you situate yourself? Do you think it is important to be able to place your research work in a tradition? Why or why not?
I think it is important to consider one’s work in an intellectual lineage – not in order to pay fealty to an approach or to bow down to the work of major intellectual figures, but to help understand one’s approach to problems and why one has certain (intellectual) problems to begin with. Why, for instance, do we all adhere to ‘close reading’ as a specific critical method? Close reading makes assumptions about the nature of writing, the function of interpretation, the operations of social ideology, etc., that it is good to bring to the light from time to time to see if it fits what we still think critical work is all about. Do hidden ideas about society lurk in texts and need a professional class to bring them to light? Or does ‘naïve reading’ gets things right (as a prof. recently claimed in the NYTimes: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/in-defense-of-naive-reading/?scp=1&sq=naive%20reading&st=cse)
I work within the tradition of critical theory, left aesthetics, and German philosophy -- which might all be the same thing. Kant – Hegel – Marx – Lukacs – Adorno – Jameson, as well as critical writing and art/literary criticism by contemporary left theorists around the world.
Q: Cusset speaks about the creation “ex nihilo” of French theory in the United States, and offers at several places (incl. p. 335) an account of why it probably could only come about within the US national-intellectual tradition. Where do you think Canada fits into this account? What are some of the pressing debates that frame intellectual life in Canada (whether inside or outside of the academy)? In what forums or venues is this debate played out (journals, conferences, etc.)?
I wrote about the formation of Canada intellectual life at some length in the introduction to Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (2009). I won’t repeat that here. I think in terms of the operations of French theory, Canada largely imitates the US: there’s no reason to offer an account of what happens in Canada (for Cusset), because French Theory in English-Canada is like French Theory in the US, while theory in Quebec follows developments in France to a greater degree. It’s more complicated than this, for certain. Quebec has developed its own forms of social criticism (in the work of Fernand Dumont or Jocelyn Letourneau, for instance). There is greater attention in Canada to (obviously) Canadian topics, to multiculturalism as a state policy, and to governmental cultural and social policy than is the case in US criticism, whether informed by French theory or not. In literary criticism, there do not seem to be distinct schools of Canadian thought at the present (which is not to say that there aren’t talented critics), nor do Canadian critics refer back to earlier Canadian thinkers (Grant, Frye, McLuhan, Innis, Wilden, Cardinal, etc.). At least that how it seems to me: I’m very curious to hear how others see things.
Major issues? The place of First Nations and Inuit in/and Canadian society (re: sovereignty, poverty, opportunity, etc.); environmental futures; multicultural society. Less so (but should be important): urban development; division of wealth in Canada and lack of opportunity for many communities; rise and power of neoliberal governments at every level (municipal, provincial, federal). These issues are discussed to a limited degree in newspapers, to a greater degree on CBC or on the internet. My own sense is that public debate and discussion – vigorous, forceful, opinionated – is lacking in Canada in comparison to many others countries. I had to go to Germany to read op-eds from Charles Taylor in the daily newspaper.
Cusset argues that there are problems reading texts outside of the contexts that gave birth to them (see. xvi where he suggests that to miss the critique of capitalism in the work of Deleuze, Lyotard, etc., means to risk “having these works speak the very language of late capitalism”). However, he also celebrates the “virtues of decontextualization” (11). What do you think about reading French theory—problem or possibility (or if both, how and in what senses)?
I came up with the question, and even so I’m going to take the easy way out: both problem and possibility! Problem, because too many of us (myself included) tend to pluck ideas and powerful sounding quotes out of random books, not worrying too much about context, tradition within which it emerges, etc., in a way that can’t help but create problems. And possibility, for the very same reasons: an irreverent use of whatever concept seems to work, creating new insights and vantage points through the interplay of distinct ideas. Psychoanalysis generates incredible insights into the operations of film, the drama of subjectivity and desire, and so on, even if one can also argue that literary and cultural critics aren’t using it ‘correctly.’ So is there any problem in using it in this way?
Cusset describes the French intellectual scene as belated and out-of-touch with those ideas, concepts and theories that are essential to understanding the contemporary world and the place of scholarship within it. Do you find his account of the creation of French theory in the U.S. and its return to France convincing? Do the French need U.S. French Theory?
I find Cusset’s account convincing. I think the French do need French Theory, if only to re-enliven their academic discourse.
Theory: a practice “that would in the end consist in producing hypotheses in a completely different sense from those of the scientific tradition—namely, intensive hypotheses, general and specific at the same time, hypotheses on communitarian apparatuses, discursive regimes, or the machinery of capitalist desire” (333-334). What do you think of this definition? Does it have any relationship to or significance for your own work?
This is how I understand the word theory. It’s also what I try to do in my own writing , even if I don’t often succeed.
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