Theory is not a tool. Someone said that theory is more like a fountain to which you return for inspiration. I think that it’s more like air—you can’t get away from it and if you do you will die. Close-reading is a theoretical engagement and so is disengagement, apathy, skimming, and throwing a book across the room in frustration. A history prof once argued that history—as an always incomplete encounter with the past—is the most catholic discipline: English is history because we’re studying texts written in the past; Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, etc. are all history because they study things that have already happened. Marx is a historian (even when talking about the history of the future). The deferral inherent in Derrida’s differance reiterates the “catholicism” of history and upsets the logic of the Cartesian “I think therefore I am” (to which we’ve all added “…better than you who does not think”). All we can think are history and theory and both insist on the impossibility of a fully-realized and coherent self, life, text, tradition, critique, communication, history, or theory. Creativity, not relativism, is the possibility effected by this refusal of complete coherence.
Isn’t the focus of all the thinkers in Examined Life this incoherence?—Ronell’s insistence on the challenge to live in the face of uncertainty; the incoherence of disavowal (the disavowal of ecological catastrophe that Zizek talks about and the disavowal of suffering and inequality that Stringer focuses on); the incoherence of living locally and thinking globally (Appiah); the simultaneous ability/disability of all bodies and minds (Taylor/Butler, Nussbaum); the disconnect between thinking revolution and buying guns (Hardt); and the incoherence of jazz and blues (West).
One of the “key assumptions” guiding English 800 is that “whatever your very different areas of specialization may be, you cannot not be interested in questions concerning ‘tradition,’ ‘critique’ and the ‘contemporary university.’” I think this is true, and it sounds a lot like Cusset’s first point in his discussion of the transferring of theoretical texts from France to America: “A mix of identity politics and an old American tradition of metacommentary on education has placed a new stress on the identities and internal diversity of the readers themselves (that is, most often, the students)” (xv). And this “internal diversity” of the students echoes the claim made by Rancière (in one of our epigraphs) that “the collective power shared by spectators [and readers of texts] … is the power each of them has to translate what she perceives in her own way, to link it to the unique intellectual adventure that makes her similar to all the rest in as much as this adventure is not like any other” (“The Emancipated Spectator,” 16-17). This sounds like “expanding our horizons” by studying Lady Gaga, and also like Angus’s “self-expression.”
And while I agree with the necessity of all of these parallel claims, I wonder if they don’t all also sound like tidy humanist ideals rooted in coherent notions of self, life, text, tradition, critique, communication, history, or theory—ideals realized as often in their histories of frustration, exclusion, violence, guilt, and confusion as in their apparent triumphs of meaning, reconciliation, and translation. Which is not to discount these ideals but instead to question their apparent coherence, to question our complicity in the logics of disavowal that interrogate the importance of The Humanities because The Humanities don’t produce easily quantifiable knowledge or skilled labourers (instead of interrogating the importance of The Humanities based on The Humanities’ insistence on the apparent coherence of those same humanist ideals—something I think is pressing). In other words, why is our metacommentary on “critique” and “tradition” in the “contemporary university” often characterized by discussions about how to save what we’ve got (or what we’re nostalgic for) by solving funding problems (i.e. philanthropist patrons) or by fixing what is broken by battening down the disciplinary hatches (i.e. by focusing on texts-in-themselves) instead of putting to work the things we’re good at—our abilities to read/write/think deeply and creatively about stuff? Why don’t we actively push on the logic of the forces/groups/people that threaten our time and space to read/write/think deeply and creatively as hard as we push on the logics of the texts we read? As we’re reminded at every turn, we haven’t got much to lose. Like the madman who talked to us about the force of narrative at the pro-seminar last week, why not stand in front of the seemingly unethical board of ethics and nod our heads no and shake our heads yes?
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