French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK

Irving Goh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367408220
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000712483
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection presents a sort of counter-history or counter-genealogy of the globalization of French thought from the point of view of scholars working in the UK. While the dominating discourse would attribute the US as the source of that globalization, particularly through the 1966 conference on the Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man at Johns Hopkins University, this volume of essays serves as a reminder that the UK has also been a principal motor of that globalization. The essays take into account how French thought and literary theory have institutionally taken shape in the UK from the 70s to today, highlight aspects of French thought that have been of particular pertinence or importance for scholars there, and outline how researchers in the UK today are bringing French thought further in terms of teaching and research in this twenty-first century. In short, this volume traces how the country has been behind the reception and development of French thought in Anglophone worlds from the late 70s to the present.

1 ‘We Are All Theorists Nowadays’

The ‘Institutionalisation’ of (French) Theory

Laurent Milesi

Once upon a time there was a fair isle shrouded in northern mists which was known for, and prided itself on, its down-to-earth empiricism. Within the hallowed sanctity of its academic halls and walls and time-honoured institutions, only those ‘ideas’ which were grounded in experience and could hold up to pragmatic, utilitarian, and positivist scrutiny were worth entertaining. There was no place for those abstract principles or ratiocinative philosophising that consider thinking to be amenable solely to Enlightening Reason or, worse, to fanciful imagination. That ‘irritable reaching after fact’ occasionally known as, or passing for, ‘Truth,’ was desirable only insofar as it entailed a logical (deductive) certainty derived from general premisses, and not a probabilistic outcome reared on the strength of subjective hypotheses: all in all, a ‘positive capability,’ therefore.

That fabled island so much resembles a stereotypical – and stereotyped – version of Britain or, more specifically perhaps (since still often reduced to), England as to be identical with it. But what is a stereotype anyway if not, as an academic acquaintance of mine (who shall remain as anonymous as the utterer of the essay title’s quoted words) once ventured, a thought against which one has spent one’s whole intellectual life fighting, only to realise eventually that there was some irreducible kernel of truth in it. For instance, the view that the na(t)ive English are all crude empiricists and pragmatists whereas the French are highly abstract and ooze theoretical sophistication… Or, as Rainer Emig more seriously warned us in his introduction to a collection of essays on another major trope of cross-country misapprehension (England versus Germany), a stereotype is ‘a primitive and limited form of cultural understanding and translation’ of the other in their difference.¹

At the risk of lapsing at times into this reductive trap, this essay will look at what beset the import and acclimatisation of, then disaffection with, ‘(French) Theory’² in British academia. The main justification for occasionally resorting to rough-and-ready simplifications is that, for reasons that will become clearer later on, this extended ‘position paper’ tinged with historical contextualisations and highly personal reminiscences has a polemic edge to it – which will no doubt be as slightly misconstrued as was Roland Barthes’s own loaded, rhetorically charged pronouncements against the critique universitaire in several of his mid-1960s writings.³ But we all have our intellectual biases – pace the staunch Leavisite I had once as a colleague when I was a young lecturer, who systematically marked down any student essay with a whiff of ‘theory’ on grounds that it ‘had ideology’ – and I unrepentantly assume what follows as my own.

How ‘We’ Became (French) Theorists

There is no space here for a proper historical reconstruction of what would inevitably sound like a mythical narrative of origins, beyond recalling that ‘Theory,’ first in the guise of ‘literary theory,’ broke onto Anglo-American shores with René Wellek and Austin Warren’s epoch-making Theory of Literature (1948), some 11 years after the controversy that had opposed F. R. Leavis to the Czech-born comparatist Wellek in Scrutiny, following the latter’s review of Revaluation in which he called upon the English critic to ‘defend [his] position more abstractly and to become conscious that large ethical, philosophical, and, of course, ultimately, also aesthetic choices are involved.’⁴ Steeped in continental philosophy, the two formalist critics proposed to establish a ‘theory of literature’ for the ‘integrated study of literature,’ subsuming both the theory of literary criticism and the theory of literary history, to designate ‘the study of the principles of literature, its categories, criteria, and the like’ (as opposed to the analyses of concrete works either as literary history or literary criticism).⁵ Insofar as Theory took hold first in native departments of English literature in British universities in order to challenge the unquestioned ideological givens of a national canon and orthodoxy, Wellek and Warren’s more systematic framework, which attempted to operate a junction between a historically grounded conception of literature and the need to articulate the theoretical place of literariness within culture, can be seen as the distant blueprint for the gradual adoption of the ideas associated with the nouvelle critique, together with a mixed ancestry of Saussurean linguistics/semiotics and Russian Formalism (Propp, Jakobson, Bakhtin-Voloshinov).⁶

With some addition of Marxist and psychoanalytic criticism (Lukács, Althusser, Raymond Williams; Freud, Jung, then Lacan) – two longer-serving, influential strands of ‘anti-humanist’ criticism –, Anglo-American and French feminisms, an array of reader-response and reception theories (Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauss, Stanley Fish) and Frankfurt School Kulturkritik (mainly Adorno and Benjamin), this was largely how ‘Introductions to Theory’ were being taught from the early 1980s onwards, with, for instance, one such popular innovative lecture series being offered on the undergraduate English programme at Oxford. An earlier institutional ferment in the British academic impetus towards theory was the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, created in 1964, which pioneered the emergence of British Cultural Studies. Especially from 1972 onwards, under the energetic directorship of Stuart Hall, the ‘Birmingham School’ was instrumental in disseminating Althusserian and more generally Marxist thought as well as Foucault’s ideas to instil a sense of cultural politics in a still largely aestheticised academic scene: namely through a series of highly influential ‘Occasional Papers,’ alongside avidly read translations of French theories coming out of Screen, which largely contributed to the journal’s fashioning of a Marxist-psychoanalytic film theory (‘Screen theory’).⁷ Thus, as the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism became assimilated into the British academic landscape, a few years after being adumbrated in The Structuralist Controversy (the delayed proceedings of the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference which was supposed to celebrate French structuralism),⁸ Theory gradually became associated with, or mutated into, (French) Critical (and Cultural) Theory. In the following decade, one of the first prominent Centres for its study at postgraduate level in Britain was set up in 1989 at Cardiff University by a triumvirate of critics-theorists-philosophers (Terence Hawkes, Catherine Belsey, Christopher Norris) often influenced by a distinctly Gallic agenda – at the time: Barthes (as well as, for Hawkes, Genette, Todorov, narratology/poetics), Lacan, Derrida, Althusser, Foucault, then Kristeva, Cixous, Lyotard and Deleuze – with the addition of the feminist theorist Chris Weedon who had been at the Birmingham Centre. To make a bold leap across generations and academic environments, what Barthes et al. did to the French critique universitaire in the 1960s provided a ready model for a comparable institutional shake-up in late 1970s–early 1980s Britain, with roughly transposable agendas of class, gender and race, canon, and ideology.

Parisian Fashion, or ‘You Don’t Know Jacques’

The appeal of being at the critical forefront, a maverick avant-garde challenging received practices and academic credos, can soon lead to a fashionable cult following once a rebellious intellectual stance coalesces into a momentum-gathering force and starts scoring institutional successes. Regardless of the issue of the ‘cultural translation’ of continental théorie into a more insular ‘theory,’ fraught with necessary and/or inevitable adaptations, appropriations, and institutional reinscriptions,⁹ one should in any case not dismiss the beneficial Verfremdungseffekt of ‘priming the canon’ and prising it open through alien influences. But what happens when the party lights go out, the staleness of habit kicks in, and a once revolutionary, now victorious agenda increasingly gives way to rote ‘disciplinary’ practices, routinisation, and more predictable, repetitive thinking bereft of any concern for the politics of theory? Perhaps this is when one should take stock of what ‘doing theory’ meant, especially for some of the now defrocked theorists of yore – as opposed to what it should still mean – in an analysis which should consider how and why it was packaged and domesticated before being jilted.

Like French Theory ‘itself,’ I crossed the Channel from my native Gaul, where studying theory at university back in the early 1980s, especially in the provinces, usually entailed barely more than an optional course on the ‘theory of literature’ focused on recognisably (pre-)structuralist components (Saussurean linguistics, narratology, poetics), to an academic environment in which Derrida, Lacan, and Co had become household names and more respected prophets than in their own country, lumbered together under a super-hot ‘ism’ which had never been familiar back home although I had been fortunate enough to frequent and be trained by academics and intellectuals close to these original thinkers: poststructuralism. Derrida himself often expressed his uneasiness about the ubiquitous ‘post’ label, rejecting any alignment with any ‘postmodernism’ (unlike Jean-François Lyotard, for instance, who made it his problematic stock-in-trade, only to be embroiled in fractious debates) and dismissing the critical consensus whereby a more progressive ‘poststructuralism’ allegedly made obsolete ‘the adventure of structuralism.’¹⁰ Likewise, Foucault rejected the poststructuralist and postmodernist labels, and preferred to characterise his own work as a critical history of modernity. Not unlike the Lacanian stade du miroir – which Malcolm Bowie reminds us should not be understood simply as a (mirror) stage but also as a more gladiatorial stadium¹¹ – the Anglicisation of French Theory was sending back the reflection of a distorted image which the few French academics then on the other side of the Channel occasionally felt the need to confront, just as Derrida and other reputed French thinkers teaching previously in American universities had to adjust to this critical parallax. Only with the gradual hegemonic spread of Anglo-American academic agendas to departments of English in Francophone universities was such a convenient stratification of French thought eventually accepted and assimilated.¹²

So, as I moved up the British academic ladder, from postgraduate scholar and tutor (Oxford) to research fellow (Cambridge) to lecturer (Swansea, then Cardiff), I became deeply aware of how some Parisian thinkers arguably belonging to the same mouvance yet as divergent and even antagonistic as ‘The Two Jakes,’ as the late Anthony Easthope was wont to quip about Derrida and Lacan,¹³ were conveniently housed under the same roof, and that ‘pigeonholing’ seemed for some to inhere in the critical act.¹⁴ Whether or not this detected tendency should be dismissed as one of those above-mentioned stereotypes which can be swiftly wielded to draw a wedge between English and French mentalities, it no doubt provided a handy template for absorbing foreign ideas more easily into a different intellectual background and institutional framework. Hailing from a country in which the recently deceased ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Opening Remarks from an Outlier: The Sur-vie of French Thought in the UK
• Theory, Philosophy, Literature
• 1 ‘We Are All Theorists Nowadays’: The ‘Institutionalisation’ of (French) Theory
• 2 Lingophobia
• 3 Creative Criticism: A Histori-Manifesto
• 4 Thoughts from France on the Animal-Human Borderline: Derrida and Animal Rights Philosophers
• 5 ‘French Thought,’ Postcolonialism, and Islam: Jacques Derrida and Abdelkebir Khatibi
• 6 Paul Virilio’s Global Britain
• 7 Critiquing Poststructuralism: The Recent Politics of French Thought
• 8 The Business School and French Philosophy
• 9 Inheriting the Question of Technology: Grammatology, Originary Technicity, Ecotechnics
• Après-coup – Deconstruction Is/In the UK
• Index