I’ve been interested and confused by what we mean when we talk about (or use, or disregard) theory and theories since I first heard murmurings about Foucault, Derrida, Marx etc. in my last year of high school. I find it a reasonable enough task to sit down and slog through books in order to better understand how a theory operates—its moves and premises—but was never sure of their relationship to the things they talked about (alteration? Clarification? None whatsoever?). I’m still confused—perhaps my problem is not the question but the initial assumption in the question: all theories must have an equivalent relationship to their object, otherwise it’s not a theory but something else entirely—but am compelled by what Neal Larsen claims in his recent “Literature, Immanent Critique, and the Problem of the Standpoint” (I’ll get to the film and reading in just a moment).
Larsen’s object, here, is as much theory as how (and why) it is one teaches theory to undergrads after Theory’s institutionalization and canonization in textbooks (the blue bible found on most of our shelves). His analysis of critical theory begins by claiming “it is, surely, a basic criterion of theory that its truth be reproducible by anyone who takes up its standpoint and thinks through and by means of its axioms and categories — which is as good as saying, reproducible by anyone expected to learn it.” (50). All theories, in other words, have protocols. If a theory cannot account for its own postulates, axioms, procedures, or conclusions, then it has either failed its own condition of possibility (which Larsen claims theory in the humanities is guilty of), or isn’t a theory at all because its posture towards its object is one of self-evidence (belief, ideology, literature [I defer to Derrida in Acts of Literature on this last category]). The object of belief is, by definition, beyond question. The object of ideology is constituted and reconfigured by an ideological horizon of meaning, while also being self-evident. The literary object is either deferred (the fictional as-if) or deformed beyond recognition (Kafka’s bug-man). But what about theory’s object?
I bring up the question of theory’s object because it was how I managed the information I tracked across Examined Life and French Theory, a problem nicely reframed by the end of both. From Cusset’s final call in his conclusion for a reconciled “heroism” free from “suspicion and guilt” (336) alongside a new “erotics of thought” (338) to Hardt and Zizek’s utopics (democracy perfected for today in Hardt’s case, and the catastrophic and unimaginable conditions through which a politics of ecology insists upon, for Zizek)—and I leave the others out partly for space but also because the following point might not apply, though it might—we see three very different methodologies tending towards a similar imperative by way of a politics of the unimaginable. As apparatuses, Cusset’s closet Deleuzianism, Hardt’s post-Marxism and Zizek’s Lacanian-Marxism are rife with differences (means and ends, to name two), yes, but a tendency today towards figuring the unimaginable, or making the impossible possible fuels all three. Hardt’s openly anti-dialectical method would realize itself in “instigating utopia everyday,” which is equally unimaginable as Zizek’s dialectical conclusion that what we need is an acceptance that nature is a series of unimaginable catastrophes, contra the more common ecological conception of a perfect, harmonious nature at the mercy of human (mis)usage, in order to confront the real (though “disavowed”) ecological catastrophe attending our current modes of consumption. For him, a formulaic abstract materialism (the referentless operations of mathematical formulas) is the aesthetic dimension of the unimaginable. And on a heremeneutical register, Cusset champions the spontaneous eroticism of the “lawless zone between the original appraisers of meaning and value and future owners, a zone formed completely of interstices, within which far from the guardians of the Work, texts themselves will be put to work” (338). Thinking utopia today, or the aesthetics of abstraction alongside disavowal, or the zone of potential interpretation (as opposed to interpretation, as such) refers not so much to the objects of theories, but to theory’s own limitations.
Is the process of thinking the impossible by way of a set of identifiable procedures a theoretical process? If so, then god help us if we are after theory (Fukuyama was right!). If not—and the answer, I realize as I trace my own logic and look at the clock, could very well be a ginormous NO!—then I’m left with my initial confusion (what is the relationship between theory and its object[s]?). But if the latter is true, then I feel comfortable (without putting much stock in feelings) in calling this a failed attempt to think a theory of theory, which might be impossible. But if it’s impossible—if one really can’t account for the relationship between theory and its object by thinking about theory as an object (what is it? what does it do? is it an it?) then “it,” itself, might be premised on an impossibility, in which case I’m back to the halfway point of this ramble….and so on….
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