Theory After 'Theory'

Jane Elliott, Derek Attridge, Jane Elliott, Derek Attridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415484183
• eBook ISBN: 9781136827402
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume argues that theory, far from being dead, has undergone major shifts in order to come to terms with the most urgent cultural and political questions of today. Offering an overview of theory's new directions, this groundbreaking collection includes essays on affect, biopolitics, biophilosophy, the aesthetic, and neoliberalism, as well as examinations of established areas such as subaltern studies, the postcolonial, and ethics.

Influential figures such as Agamben, Badiou, Arendt, Deleuze, Derrida and Meillassoux are examined in a range of contexts. Gathering together some of the top thinkers in the field, this volume not only speculates on the fate of theory but shows its current diversity, encouraging conversation between divergent strands. Each section places the essays in their contexts and stages a comparison between different but ultimately related ways in which key thinkers are moving beyond poststructuralism.

Contributors: Amanda Anderson, Ray Brassier, Adriana Cavarero, Eva Cherniavsky, Rey Chow, Claire Colebrook, Laurent Dubreuil, Roberto Esposito, Simon Gikandi, Martin Hagglünd, Peter Hallward, Brian Massumi, Peter Osborne, Elizabeth Povinelli, William Rasch, Henry Staten, Bernard Stiegler, Eugene Thacker, Cary Wolfe, Linda Zerilli.

Part I

Assessing the Field

1

Philosophy After Theory

Transdisciplinarity and the New

Peter Osborne

In what sense is something called ‘theory’ over? And in what way might the manner of its passing have opened up a space for its renewal? At first sight, these questions appear parochial and outmoded. ‘Theory’ did not end, it lost a brief and extraordinary institutional hegemony; a hegemony that was restricted to particular disciplinary sites within the Anglophone humanities during its heroic ‘French’ period (1975– 1995): primarily, literary studies of various sorts (Cussett 2008). Yet, to confine this episode to the past would itself be to fall prey to fashion. For there are deep-seated issues at stake in the struggles around ‘theory’, going as far back as German philosophy in the last decade of the eighteenth century, which not only retain their relevance today, but have acquired new pertinences – and not merely for reasons of expediency, associated with the global expansion of the English-language academic publishing industry. (‘Theory’ is also a marketing category, of course.)¹ These issues concern, among other things, the possibilities and manner of knowing the whole – the totality of conditions that pertain to experience – a question which has been given a new lease of life by the tendentially global dominance of a single economic system. It appears today, in part, as a question about the possibility and modes of knowing oneself (Socrates’s old question) as a subject of capitalistic social relations, social relations into which is inscribed a relentless production of both novelty and crisis (Osborne 2010a). To see how this might be connected to the fate and prospects of ‘theory’ in the Anglophone humanities, it will be useful to start with a sketch of the two main traditions of theory at issue in these debates.

The kind of theory whose moment is supposedly past is that which became known colloquially in the 1970s as ‘high theory’, ‘theory with a capital T’ or, more polemically but also in various ways more neutrally, ‘critical theory’. High theory by association with uses of the term ‘high’ in the Anglican Church and art criticism (that is, a particular combination of ritual, universalism and exclusivity); theory with a capital T, by dint of a passing use of capitalization by Louis Althusser; critical theory, more variously, but largely via its occupation of the institutional space of literary criticism, in conjunction with an aspiration to social criticism. The plurality of connotations indicates something of the multiplicity of investments at stake in the field. ‘High theory’ cross-codes a hierarchical ecclesiastical designation with the metaphorical height of abstraction to invest such abstraction with social and intellectual gravitas. ‘Theory with a capital T’ extends the theological metaphor (from God to Theory), drawing on the philosophical heritage of German idealism via the archaic practice in English and French of citing the nouns translating its central concepts in upper case, reifying concepts by treating them as proper names: Spirit, Notion, Idea, etc. By dint of its capitalization, Theory posits itself as the successor to these categories. More ambiguously, the institutional convenience ‘critical theory’ suggests a transition from theory to practice within theory itself, and hence within the educational practices of the academy. This was the ground on which the so-called ‘culture wars’ were fought in the wake of the heyday of theory in the United States; not just between Left and Right, but within the Left itself. (In the first case, the issue was the political content of educational practices; in the second, it was the political relevance of cultural issues.)

The phrase ‘critical theory’ carries more content than its popular synonyms. However, this is more often than not seriously misleading, since much of the French work it is now habitually used to describe operates with a notion of ‘science’ in tension with, if not direct opposition to, the philosophical notion of critique. This applies to structuralism, in particular, including its Marxist variants.² Moreover, another significant portion of this work, part of the Heideggerian legacy – deconstruction, in particular – was constituted in explicit opposition to the claims of theory, in its classical sense (Gasché 2007). In this respect, at least, ‘critical theory’ really did function within the Anglo-American academy of the 1980s as a mere name for a heterogeneous assemblage of French, or French-inspired, theoretical writings – a label for a list of thinkers responding to a common situation with often diametrically opposed intellectual projects.

At the same time, however, ‘critical theory’ was also the long-established designation for a quite different, German tradition that first achieved self-consciousness in the mid-1930s and continued to identify itself as such into the 1990s: the Frankfurt School of critical theory associated with the Institute for Social Research (Wiggershaus 1994). This often-confusing coincidence, nonetheless, has its productive side insofar as it hints at the possibility of features common to the two traditions, deriving from deeper sources. It thus allows us to ask the question of what precisely has been surpassed in a situation defined as being ‘after theory’ from a slightly broader standpoint than is usual. The main thing the two traditions have in common is the thought that they have surpassed, or at least displaced, ‘philosophy’ in its modern disciplinary sense.

Theory After Philosophy: two Traditions

In France, ‘theory’ was an effect of, on the one hand, conceptual developments in the human sciences (structuralism/poststructuralism) and, on the other, the Marxist critique of philosophy. Althusser famously briefly used the term Théorie with a capital ‘T’ to designate what he had previously referred to as ‘Marxist philosophy’ (namely,‘the theory of theoretical practice’), in order to ‘reserve the term philosophy for ideological philosophies’, in line with Marx and Engels’s diagnosis of the ideological character of philosophy per se (‘self-sufficient philosophy’) in The German Ideology (Althusser 1977: 162; Marx and Engels 1976: 37). This inconsistent combination of the idea of historical materialism as a general theory of practices (derived from Marx’s sixth fragment of ‘On Feuerbach’) with a neo-Kantian conception of philosophy as second reflection on science (‘theoretical practices’) was, by and large, representative of an effective practice of theory more generally deriving from certain privileged disciplinary objects: linguistics (Saussure), anthropology (Levi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan), history of thought (Foucault) and literature (Tel Quel), in particular. It is the singularity of the term ‘theory’ here that registers its internal relation to the traditional aspirations of philosophy. However, it aspired to a general scientificity of a non-‘philosophical’ (and in particular, decisively non-Hegelian) kind associated with the rationalism of French studies in the history of science (Lecourt 1975).

If French thinkers have dominated theoretical developments in the Anglophone humanities since the mid 1970s, it is primarily because of the powerfully ‘post-philosophical’ coding of the philosophical aspects of their work – post-philosophical, that is, in a delicately dialectical sense, whereby everything intellectually productive about the European philosophical tradition is maintained outside the disciplinary setting of philosophy. There are a number of conditions of possibility of this situation, not the least being the irrelevance of the domestic analytical philosophical tradition to the rest of the humanities and the internal, philosophical problematicity of the disciplinary autonomy of philosophy itself. Indeed, recognition of this problematic character (the contradiction between an inherited aspiration to absolute universality and a disciplinary particularity) is more or less a condition of philosophical modernity itself. It thus comes in a variety of forms. However, because ‘Theory’ with a capital ‘T’ was generally adopted in a non-Marxist form in the Anglo-American reception of French thought in the 1970s, it tended to sidestep (rather than to specify, as was its desired role in Althusser’s writings) that thought’s complex relationship to European philosophy. This allowed for the uninhibited investment of broad transdisciplinary fields by general-theoretical categories, the ultimate status of which was unclear: be it the ‘textuality’ of a general semiotics, the ‘discourses’ of a Foucauldian historicism or the ‘topography’ of Lacanian metapyschology.

As a result, in its Anglo-American guise ‘theory’ became largely either pragmatic or deconstructive – that is, either over-determined by specific (often political) uses, or marked by a reflective distance from the metaphysical claims acknowledged to be implicit in its concepts – or both. That is to say, ‘theory’ became in a certain sense anti-theoretical, insofar as ‘theory’ had previously been associated, within philosophy, with metaphysics or doctrine (Lehre) more generally. ‘Theory’ rejected the doctrinal; hence its ironic dialectical identity with that which turned ‘against’ it in the US academy in the mid-1980s. As the prevailing philosophical mode of Anglo-American intellectual life, pragmatism became the philosophical unconscious of post-Marxist literary and cultural studies (Osborne 2000, 2006). By the early 1990s, however, as the left political cultures orienting the academic intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s collapsed, theory’s pragmatic orientation became, on the one hand, increasingly symbolic (the ‘culture wars’) and, on the other, increasingly individualistic and wishful (Dollimore 2000). And as theory became increasingly commodified (branded by author’s names), its reception began to succumb to the reification and repetitions of commodification. At the same time, the disavowal of philosophy involved in the forgetting of a critique that had largely constituted theory in the French context became increasingly problematic, especially once the far less equivocally philosophical writings of thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze were subjected to the same discursive conditions. Under these conditions they were (and continue to be) frequently travestied by the pragmatic uses to which they are put. One reaction to this situation was a rejection of ‘T/theory’ (both with and without a capital T) and a return to disciplinarity (and with it, both ‘old’ historicism and aesthetics) within the humanities. At the same time, pressure began to build up within the discursive space of Theory for a re-evaluation of the virtues of philosophy. From the standpoint of the Anglo-American reception of the tradition of French theory, the current empirical answer to the question ‘What is theory (in the Anglophone humanities) after “Theory”?’ is most definitely ‘Philosophy’.

This turn to explicitly philosophical references in theoretical work across the humanities (often a turn to the citation of philosophical writings as a substitute for theoretical work) is broadly a turn to what Marx called ‘self-sufficient philosophy’, philosophy in its classical modern sense. It has taken two main antagonistic forms: quasi-Levinasian and other post-Derridean forms of ‘ethics’ – a convergence of topic with the post-analytical mainstream of liberal political philosophy – on the one hand (Butler 2004 and Critchley 2007, for example), and the full-blown metaphysics of Deleuze and Alain Badiou, on the other (Osborne 2007).³

This is the ironic endpoint of the main Anglo-Saxon trajectory of ‘French theory’ today. It represents a more-or-less wholesale renunciation of the epistemo-critical concerns of the 1960s and 1970s.⁴ This tradition of ‘theory’ has been paid for its disavowal of philosophy (the forgetting of the specificities of its critique) with a belated philosophical vengeance.⁵What of its German cousin?

French ‘critical theory’ was the product of the reception of a philosophically heterogeneous body of theoretical writings from France into the literary departments of the Anglo-American academy, where criticism was an established literary pursuit. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School, on the other hand, was both self-designating and the object of explicit and ongoing theoretical reflection. Consequently, while the emphasis in the former was on theory, in general – the main opposition being between theoretical and atheoretical or anti-theoretical (everyday or aesthetic) interpretative practices – the emphasis within the latter was more decisively on criticism or critique (Kritik), the main opposition being between ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ theory.

The Frankfurt notion of critical theory derives from the critical turn that took place in the self-conception of the work of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1937, in Max Horkheimer’s famous essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ – an essay that sets out from the question ‘What is theory?’ (Horkheimer 1972). Horkheimer used the term ‘critical theory’ to denote what we might call the ‘negative’ turn in his conception of historical materialism as an interdisciplinary social theory. This was the consequence for his Hegelian methodology (dialectically totalizing the results of the positive sciences) of his inability to identify a representative of the future within the present (as a result of the degeneration of communism in the Soviet Union), from the standpoint of which the totality might be unified. It involved the transformation of ‘critical activity’ itself into the ‘subject’ of a theory that consequently related to totality only negatively, as a purely speculative methodological standpoint for a critique of the present. This theory is ‘German’ in that it represents the philosophical heritage of the strong programme of German idealism within a dialectically interdisciplinary social theory, first evoked by Engels in his 1888 Ludwig Feuerbach and the Exit from Classical German Philosophy. (The standard English translation of Ausgang – ‘exit’ or ‘way out’ – as ‘end’ in the title of this book has led to a century of philosophical confusion.) The model of ‘critique’ here was Marx’s critique of political economy: a coincidence of philosophical universality and the historical projection of practice, via the critical relation to a specialized science, albeit here in a form in which critical activity (‘theoretical reflection’) stands in as the place-holder for the current absence of emancipatory politics on a world-historical scale.

In the history of the Frankfurt School, ‘critical theory’, in Horkheimer’s technical sense, lasted only for about 3 years, 1937–1940, after which it was replaced by the critique of instrumental reason, which became the basis for the Ur-historical narrative of Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dubiel 1985; Horkheimer 2004; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). Critique of instrumental reason is not ‘critical theory’ in the sense of ‘theory’ in which the phrase derives its meaning from its opposition to ‘traditional theory’. Rather, it has more affinities with the Kantian sense of ‘critique’, which is precisely not theory as such, although here it occupies the discursive space of the theoretical, by other means: the literary-philosophical constructivism of the Romantic fragment, for example; hence Dialectic of Enlightenment’s subtitle, Philosophical Fragments, which also evokes Kierkegaard, of course. In the early 1960s, in reaction against this Romantic and at times almost Schopenhauerian negativism, Horkheimer’s early 1930s Institute programme of interdisciplinary materialism (the prequel to Critical Theory) was revived by the young Habermas. It briefly represented a methodological model for overcoming the perceived impasse of a philosophy conscious only of its own critique, represented by the purely negative restoration of philosophy in Adorno’s work, su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: theory’s nine lives
• Part I: Assessing the field
• 1. Philosophy after theory: transdisciplinarity and the new
• 2. Theory as a research programme – the very idea
• 3. Theory after critical theory
• 4. Extinct theory
• Part II: Between theory and practice: judgement, will, potentiality
• 5. Perception attack: the force to own time
• 6. The will of the people: dialectical voluntarism and the subject of politics
• 7. The persistence of hope: critical theory and enduring in late liberalism
• 8. The practice of judgement: Hannah Arendt’s ‘Copernican revolution’
• Part III: Rethinking the politics of representation
• 9. When reflexivity becomes porn: mutations of a modernist theoretical practice
• 10. The canny subaltern
• 11. Theory after postcolonial theory: rethinking the work of mimesis
• Part IV: Biopolitics and ethics
• 12. After life: swarms, demons and the antinomies of immanence
• 13. Inclining the subject: ethics, alterity and natality
• 14. The person and human life
• Part V: Renewing the aesthetic
• 15. The wrong turn of aesthetics
• 16. Literature after theory, or: the intellective turn
• 17. The liberal aesthetic
• Part VI: Philosophy after theory
• 18. The arche-materiality of time: deconstruction, evolution and speculative materialism
• 19. Concepts, objects, gems
• 20. Pharmacology of spirit: and that which makes life worth living
• Index