Theory Matters

The Place of Theory in Literary and Cultural Studies Today

Martin Middeke, Christoph Reinfandt, Martin Middeke, Christoph Reinfandt

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137474285
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This book demonstrates that theory in literary and cultural studies has moved beyond overarching master theories towards a greater awareness of particularity and contingency – including its own.What is the place of literary and cultural theory after the Age of Theory has ended?
Grouping its chapters into rubrics of metatheory, cultural theory, critical theory and textual theory, the collection demonstrates that the practice of "doing theory" has neither lost its vitality nor can it be in any way dispensable. Current directions covered include the renewed interest in phenomenology, the increased acknowledgement of the importance of media history for all cultural practices and formations, complexity studies, new narratology, literary ethics, cultural ecology, and an intensified interest in textual as well as cultural matter.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Martin Middeke and Christoph Reinfandt (eds.)Theory Matters10.1057/978-1-137-47428-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Place of Theory Today

Martin Middeke¹ and Christoph Reinfandt²

(1)

University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany

(2)

University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

End Abstract

Taking stock of the ‘history and current condition of theory’ for teaching purposes in 2011, Richard Bradford diagnosed ‘the ongoing, curious—though apparently not atrophied—condition of After Theory’ for the disciplines of literary and cultural studies (Bradford 1–2). While there is certainly a lot of theoretical thinking being done, there seems to be no unifying paradigm which could serve as a platform for dialogue between the various theoretical interests that can be identified, such as, for example, the renewed interest in the phenomenological side of reading processes that figures the (reading of a) text as an event (see Attridge; Felski 2008; Wiemann), the increased acknowledgement of the foundational importance of media history for all cultural (and that includes theoretical) practices and formations (see, for example, Siskin and Warner), the impact of cognitive approaches on a variety of fields in the humanities (see Zunshine), the turn towards notions of a cultural ecology in the larger context of complexity thinking (chaos theory, systems theory, self-organization, posthumanism; see, for example, Morton; Wolfe), or the longing for ‘new sociologies of literature’ (Felski and English) and other hotspots of theoretical debate identified by the journal New Literary History under Rita Felski’s editorship.

What all these reorientations share is an anxiety as to where we are going after poststructuralism, an anxiety based on a longing to go beyond the confines of the linguistic turn by focusing on the interplay and incommensurability between textual materiality (language, writing, print, text/book, other media formats) and its reference (with all caveats attached) to culture (practices and artefacts) and the reality constituted and constructed under these conditions. The perspective of deconstruction, it turns out, is perceived to fail (or partially fail) to acknowledge the specific productivity of writing: its active capability to transform exteriority, lack, and culture into interiority, depth, and nature. The new approaches no longer carry the burden of having to prove that all metaphysical identities cancel themselves through never being able to fully control the semiotic sphere from which they derive. Instead, they want to address the question of how such constructions positively function and how they can acquire the power of social and technical reality principles in spite of their basically unstable status. ¹

Doing theory in its most inclusive sense seems to involve four basic orientations, which can be heuristically mapped onto the vertical axis of abstraction/applicability and the horizontal axis of culture/cognition in the following chart:

In its most abstract dimension, the condition of After Theory has induced a strong tendency towards metatheory, that is, a theory that reflects upon theory and its most foundational concerns and dimensions such as ontology, epistemology and truth, the roles of representation and mediation, the emergence of constructivism and its relation to fictionality, and finally modern culture’s increasing reliance on and acknowledgement of reflexivity leading to what we will call ‘The Cultures of Reflexivity’ in the first Interlude chapter in this volume. Symptomatic in this respect would be recent book titles like Theory after Theory (Birns), Theory after ‘Theory’ (Elliot and Attridge), or, in yet another turn of the screw in typically German fashion, Theorytheory (Grizelj and Jahraus; our trans.).

The middle layer, where most theoretical activity takes place, ranges from cultural theory, which ‘opens out from the object(s) under consideration in the effort to provide a broad social and historical context for understanding’ to critical theory (used here in a broader understanding as an umbrella term for literary theories founded on critique), which ‘turns inward to enable us to assess the adequacy of our ways of seeing and thinking’ (Payne and Barbera xiii). While the “outward” dimension of culture has been customarily addressed in terms of social structure with its concomitant power relations in terms of gender, race, and class by politically oriented approaches, aspects of representation (in both the political and the epistemological sense of the word) and mediation and their influence on the formation of historical semantics have become prominent foci of interest in recent years. It is in this dimension that theories on concepts like ideology or habitus have tried to come to terms with the interface between “outward” culture and the “inward” processes of making sense, which have been addressed in more broadly experiential as well as more specialized phenomenological and, more recently, cognitive terms—the systematic contours of this interface will be traced in the second Interlude chapter on ‘Ideologies of Habitus’.

And finally, on the ground, as it were, there has been a renewed interest in textual theory. For a long time this interest has gone hand in hand with a spirit of rehabilitating the virtues of philology with its regard for the material text and the material conditions of its cultural production vis-à-vis the ‘specifically literary interpretation of culture’ fostered by the modernist turn to language and hermeneutics (or, later, by the postmodernist emergence of ‘meta-interpretive interests that played themselves out, in diverse ways, under the banner of theory’; McGann 13). More recently, textual theory has been reformulated in a spirit of acknowledging that, ‘in literary scholarship, the Age of Theory has yielded to the age of the material text and its fortunes’ (Chaudhuri 2). And yet, the problem of interpretation has not been overcome, and we will address this conundrum in a final Interlude chapter entitled ‘On Interpretation’ between the sections on critical theory and textual theory.

All this would seem to indicate that a new mode of theory will have to be developed, a mode of theory more alert to the material conditions of writing and reading in evolving and converging media contexts as well as in private and institutional situations, a mode of theory which combines the insights of philology, hermeneutics, and Theory on a new footing and acknowledges the interface between the semiotics of texts and available cultural semantics. A similar step “beyond Theory” in the emphatic sense established by the late 1980s emerges from the ongoing debate about reading in the humanities. While the traditional hermeneutics of affirmation predicated on what a text means was under the auspices of Theory superseded by a hermeneutics of suspicion with its overwhelming interest in why a text means in the politically grounded agendas of “critical reading”, “symptomatic reading”, or “suspicious reading” inspired by Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the linguistic turn in general, more recent approaches have taken their cue from the cultural, medial, and material turns that followed and insisted on the necessity to take into account and even practice ‘uncritical reading’ (Warner), ‘surface reading’ (Best and Marcus), or at least ‘reflective reading’ (Felski 2009), replacing the emphatic why of suspicion with a more functionally minded how in the process.

Of these new developments, it is probably Rita Felski’s notion of “reflective reading” that seems most integrative in its attempt at ‘harness[ing] the intellectual and theoretical curiosity associated with critique to develop more compelling and comprehensive accounts of why texts matter to us’ by ‘assum[ing] that literature’s worldly knowledge is not only suspicious, subversive or adversarial, [but] that it can also amplify and replenish our sense of how things are’ (Felski 2009, 34). ²

Following up on the diagnosis of a postmodernist “disaggregation” of theory in the humanities since the 1970s that Vincent Leitch discussed a decade ago in a volume with the same title as ours, these recent developments suggest that the return of materiality as a concern of theory (see, for example, Coole and Frost, as well as, with a neo- or late-Marxist bent, Nilges and Sauri) has added an additional punning layer of meaning to the title Theory Matters which justifies it on new grounds: It is our contention that the borderlines of the dimensions of a theoretical preoccupation with culture and literary texts are not mutually exclusive but permeable. In fact, the reading coordinates emerging from any theoretical endeavour would have to bring down the insights of metatheory, cultural theory, and critical theory to the level of practice, application, and method, in short: to the level of encounters between readers and texts of all kinds that characterize both contemporary culture at large and the typical teaching situation of the discipline of literary and cultural studies. Such reading coordinates would have to address the relationship between normative and reflexive reading practices with their various individual and institutional contexts as well as the relationship between the long-standing and still valid paradigm of mimesis of reality and the emerging paradigm of a mimesis of process. The tentative ideal of a metatheory of practice instead of a merely theoretical metatheory and, vice versa, of a textual practice which is likewise fuelled by (meta)theoretical reflection governs the overall approach of the volume. Such an ideal is basically functional and acknowledges the differentiation of knowledge in its uneasy relationship with notions of progress even within the discipline while trying to counter this complexity with establishing well-organized general aims and a road map for integrating the various levels of doing theory.* * *

A short survey of the chapters of this book illustrates major approaches to the question of where the place of (literary and cultural) theory today can be allocated. Literature and/as cultural material(s), contexts, texts, textures, objects, signifiers delineate a highly interdisciplinary, reflexive, counter-discursive, alternative imaginary. The chapters suggest a creative and imaginative cross-fertilizing, a structural affinity of reality, theory, and art. Theory functions as an instance of cultural (self-)reflection, as an inventive mediating instance which seeks to explain and to express the complex and contingent relationality that exists between all constituent parts, factors, and motivations which make up and influence the reading and interpreting of both literature/culture and lifeworld, that is, the world that we experience together. The chapters prove that doing theory, on the one hand, advises us to pay attention to and accept the singular and the particular, but, on the other hand, this does not mean that we have to give up all attempts at generalization. The search for conclusion and abstraction, given that both are always preliminary and temporary, must go beyond theory-political correctness or the resistant nature of the particular.

In the opening essay of the metatheory section of the volume, J. Hillis Miller investigates whether or not “rhetorical readings” still play a role in the age of digital telecommunications and media. On the one hand, he accentuates the potential inherent in the knowledge of rhetoric in the study of literature in order to lay bare and expose ideologies and their manipulative strategies; on the other hand, he advocates the development of a pictographic theory of reading mixed media productions, that is, the need to transfer some of the protocols of “rhetorical reading” to works that are multimedia mixtures of words, sounds, and visual images, along with the material, bodily gestures of hand–eye coordination (digital dexterity) that are necessary, for example, to play a video game.

Gerold Sedlmayr interrogates the specific literariness of theory. By juxtaposing theoretical stances such as those of the German media-philosopher Friedrich Kittler or Derek Attridge in The Singularity of Literature, Sedlmayr addresses the issue of a demand for “objective” and/or “singular” targets and objectives of theoretical methodologies in literary studies. Attridge’s assumption that literary theory depends on the theorist’s experiencing of literature—an experiencing constituted by an excess of “rationality”—is combined in the chapter with Paul de Man’s advocating of a subversively political, because self-confidently “rhetorical”, kind of theory. This highlights the fact that, for de Man, the demand for objectivity in literary studies is far from self-evident; rather, it is the consequence of past knowledge formations. Hence theory can serve to question tendencies to naturalize academic discourses as objective and non-ideological. The literariness of theory evolves from the acknowledgement of the fact that texts not only very much resist our attempts to understand them completely, but that our desire for understanding them is also based upon their alterity. Further drawing on Paul de Man, Sedlmayr argues that it is the task of theory to dismantle the historical interconnectedness of knowledge and to go beyond the establishment of purely subjective points of view.

Taking his cue from J. Hillis Miller’s deconstructive reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s unfinished poem ‘The Triumph of Life’, Christian Huck goes beyond purely rhetorical reading by taking the materiality of the book into account. Reader and text are understood as being engaged in a contingent meeting, which is mediated by the materiality of the book. Huck suggests that reading a poem would have to account for the affective responses of corporeal readers as well as for the interpretative efforts of the educated readers’ minds. Materiality offers contexts that go beyond mere signification processes. Huck concludes that the performativity of the text as medium entails a specific semantic substratum which would be lost in a purely rhetorical reading. Understanding literature, therefore, rests on both meaning and materiality. Media can be looked upon as ‘material-semiotic nodes’ (Huck) as they open avenues of possible meanings, but then are themselves nothing but specific realizations within a specific historical continuum and its potentialities.

Both Julian Wolfreys’s and Dino Galetti’s contributions turn to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in order to evaluate such central categories as subject, matter, material, perception, perspective, and epistemological difference with regard to both the interpretation of literature and the consequences for theoretical conceptualizing. For Wolfreys, the theoretician is witness to the material experience of being; theory is presented as a veritable reflection of the temporal and processual character of existence. Perception as memory of the trace of experience can only return as an after-effect, in the manner of re-presentation, of mental image, the trace of a trace. Being and theory are constituted by this alterity, which suggests that the self is informed by loss, by change, by incompleteness. In a similar vein, Ga...