Literature Departments and the Practice of Theory

Leroy Searle

MLN, Volume 121, Number 5, December 2006 (Comparative Literature Issue),

pp. 1237-1261 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2007.0013

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/212789

Access provided by Trinity College Dublin (11 Feb 2019 13:59 GMT)
 Critical Archive

Literature Departments and the

Practice of Theory
❦

Leroy Searle

Two years before returning to Frankfurt after the end of the Second
World War, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno published their
now classic Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947), translated as Dialectic of
Enlightenment.1 Their argument is extraordinary, unfolding the inner
tendency to self-mystification of the faculty of Reason, but in a tone that
reads like the internal monologue of Reason’s very self. It appeared
in print almost concurrently with the waves of shock and horror at
the gradual revelation and documentation of the slaughter of Jews in
the “Final Solution” of the Third Reich, itself carried out as if Reason
had required it. Of course Adorno and Horkheimer knew of the Nazi
persecutions of the Jews, for it had driven Adorno to England in
1934 and then the United States, where he joined Horkheimer—who
had gone directly to Columbia University in 1933, not only for his
own survival but to ensure the continuation of the Institute of Social
Research. For Horkheimer, here was the stunning intellectual les-
son (well in advance of Hannah Arendt’s better known treatment of
thoughtlessness as lending a banality to evil2): that the uncritical trust
in what was already accepted as Truth does the work of evil for it. This
Horkheimer had anticipated in his assertion several years earlier that
“[t]he real social function of philosophy lies in its criticism of what is
prevalent.”3 The unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust were carried

MLN 121 (2006): 1237–1261 © 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
1238 LEROY SEARLE

out, after all, not by manifest monsters but ordinary people just doing
their jobs, thoughtlessly, as Arendt asserts of Eichmann, but stunningly,
with the support or tacit acquiescence of people as distinguished for
their thinking as Martin Heidegger and Pope Pius XII.4
Forty years ago, it would have been almost superfluous even to
mention these circumstances as they had become, from about 1948
to the mid 1960s, an indelible fact of intellectual and moral life. For
the French, the horror was compounded by the dismal record of col-
laboration under the Vichy regime, while in England and the United
States, the pretense to moral superiority so often claimed by the victors
in war still had to confront the chilling memory of appeasement and
inaction and the shameful dispossession and incarceration of Japanese
Americans during the war. But any reader of a daily newspaper since
1989 knows the repetitions in Cambodia, in Rwanda and Burundi,
Bosnia, and now Darfur. Genocide has not stopped; neither have
slavery, torture, and the legion of abominations that attend unchecked
power, commonly shored up by appeals to religion and the prevalent
philosophy of the moment, to assert that the powerful are, in fact,
the party of Virtue.
This matter bears mentioning not as a prelude to tedious and ten-
dentious moralizing, but as a contemporary reflection on the social
and political context of the forty years between the end of World War II
and the breaking apart of the Soviet communist alliance in central and
eastern Europe so conveniently symbolized by the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989. For it is also the period of time during which the Lit-
erature department, most commonly an English department but less
frequently one of Literature or Comparative Literature, became what
seemed a permanent fixture of academic and educational life.5
To be sure, the traditions of education in the North Atlantic, from
their roots in the Latin Schools of the Renaissance, had always been
essentially literary education, from the Humanist recuperation of the
literature of the ancients that was one of the two main engines of
intellectual revival—the other being the Copernican revolution in
science—to the massive build-up of private and public institutions of
education since the late eighteenth century meant to prepare children
for citizenship and to train the leaders of the future. To be educated
meant, in the common phrase, to be “well read.” But particularly in
the United States, the soldiers returning from World War II, fortified
by the GI Bill which supported their ambitions to become educated,
created just the conditions under which a heretofore crabby and
conservative movement of American agrarians, expatriates, and mar-
 M L N 1239

ginalized Britons could blossom into the New Criticism, offering not
only a curriculum but a method that did not depend on inherited
wealth or deep historical learning.6 Part of its success, I would argue,
was that it substituted, for a time, learning to read well, for the older
historicist conception of an education shaped in the main by reading
the Greek and Latin classics. Both enterprises are inherently conser-
vative, though the opening up of higher education on a democratic
basis is a change of such importance as to count as radical.
As both Richard Ohmann and Evan Watkins have asserted in other
contexts of advocacy, what happens in English departments or English
classes at any level is critically involved in the circulation (and incul-
cation) of cultural values,7 especially since taking an English class,
by the 1960s, had become something like a cultural universal in the
United States: from the elementary grades through the university,
one could not graduate from any school without taking, and getting
through, at least one English course.8 On the one hand, considered as
a subject matter and discipline, literature, no matter how we define or
characterize it, consists in the main of works of reflection, of concrete
thinking, not about technical or scientific problems, but on matters
of moral choice and personal assent—or dissent. On the other hand,
considered as the practice(s) of theory,9 in the lineage I am sketching
out from the end of World War II to the present, literature has always
been taken up in the context of practical advocacy, explicit or implied,
relative to social practices and moral issues that concern us directly.
But let us return specifically to Horkheimer and Adorno, whose early
collaboration and later work with colleagues in the Frankfurt School is
one of the principal sources of the development of subsequent critical
theory. The sheer oddness of the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment
is its ultra-enlightened quality, morphing the singular architectonic
invention of the grand master of Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant,
the transcendental critique, into a new genre of literary theory, the
Cultural Critique, revealing the a priori principle of Myth imbedded
in the heart of the dream of Reason. Casting back to the literature
of Greece, Horkheimer and Adorno employ their own derivative of
Hegelian dialectic, by way of Marx and Nietzsche, to show that Reason,
positioned by Kant in the first critique to regulate the operation of
the understanding, only comes into its own as a faculty of desire to
determine the will to do its moral duty in the second critique. But
it doesn’t know when to stop. Reason, assuredly a faculty of desire,
absolutely desires Power, and is therefore systematically susceptible of
being mystified as to its own status and operation. It may intend the
1240 LEROY SEARLE

autonomy of the enlightened subject—or may prepare the way for

der Führer—but on either side of this practical antinomy, Pure Reason
impels the apotheosis of the state, and presides over the relentless
will to dominate in all that Reason undertakes.
The dilemma of the philosophical critic lies in the fact that the
intellectual rigor of his or her training comes into conflict with the
practical imperative of what it reveals. How can one be intellectually
disinterested when considering the meaning of the Holocaust? It
resembles the lack of affect so chillingly conveyed by Swift’s dispassion-
ate remark in Tale of a Tub: “Last week I saw a woman flayed and you
will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.”10
The problem lies in the sequel to moral outrage: the transcendental
critique of our cognitive and moral powers gives way to a practical,
doctrinal, and finally dogmatic critique of the political, driven forward
by the conviction of at last knowing the social truth about Truth.11
For all its historical importance, I would venture the opinion that
Dialectic of Enlightenment is not, after all, a very good book, not a very
good argument, and hardly in control of its own themes, but as an
example of a new way to write criticism, it was stunning. When it was
reissued in 1969 it answered to a need, then more or less desperate,
to rearticulate a genealogy in the critique of power for the genera-
tion then trying to come to terms with the post-war challenges of the
civil rights movement, feminism, and the international eruption of
multiple wars of national liberation. So too the works and authors that
have since become something like the testamentary prophets of high
theory—Gramsci, Lacan, Althusser, de Man, Derrida, Foucault: except
for Gramsci and Lacan, these were writers whose professional careers
were shaped by the exigencies of the immediate post-war period, hav-
ing to confront (or dissemble) the moral obliquity of collaboration,
having to decide what to do about Jean-Paul Sartre and Heidegger,
Marxism and Existentialism, learning to read Hegel following either
Kojève or Hippolyte and needing thereby to reinvent Marx, Nietzsche,
and Freud, so as not simply to disappear from history at the very
time when it called most urgently for revision and reform, if not for
revolution. De Man neatly encapsulated the prevailing ethos (and the
dominant rhetoric) of crisis, in urging that “crisis and criticism” are
so closely allied that perhaps the terms are redundant:
In periods that are not periods of crisis or in individuals bent on avoiding
crisis at all cost, there can be all kinds of approaches to literature: histori-
cal, philological, psychological, etc., but there can be no criticism. For such
periods or individuals will never put the act of writing into question by
relating it to its specific intent.12
 M L N 1241

The crisis in this case pertains not merely to literary criticism. It is a

crisis of practical philosophy, of ethics and politics, in which the linger-
ing question of the intent of writing went far beyond Paul Ricoeur’s
notion of a “hermeneutics of suspicion”13 right up to a dogmatic
conviction that the intent of writing, so far as it could be discerned,
appears to be to dissemble, to oppress, to dominate, and to control.
For de Man in particular, the crisis of rhetorical criticism (his term
for theory) lies in the recognition that literariness is not a kind of lan-
guage, but the universal torsion of figuration that is inseparable from
language itself. Put in the idiom of intent, all the act of writing can do,
evidently, is to lie.14 For Foucault, and to a lesser degree, Althusser, the
crisis is more immediate and sustained in the sense that it pertains to
the subtlety of power as it inhabits all social and political institutions,
and all forms of writing that have in common principally the fact that
they are always and already ideologically saturated.
There is almost nothing here of the cerebral politeness of Lord
Acton, intoning that “Power corrupts; Absolute power corrupts abso-
lutely”: it is worse than that, more of a cause for concern than that,
because there is no immediately available standard by which to discern
what would count as “corrupt.” Power is insidious in that it is embed-
ded in all our institutions, our forms of speech, our professions, and
our daily practices. It is worth recalling in this respect that at the time
of the re-issue of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the best known among the
writers and thinkers of the Frankfurt school was certainly not Hork-
heimer, and by no means Adorno, but Herbert Marcuse, whose Reason
and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941; rpt. 1954) and
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
(1964) had become almost required pocket companions for the New
Left, and whose Eros and Civilization (1955) served the same func-
tion for advocates of the Sexual Revolution. Today, it is not just that
Marcuse is not widely read because his works are dated, but that his
view of the questions is so manifestly crude, by comparison, but still
continuous with Foucault—who notoriously endeavored to preserve
an almost Kantian distance (or tactical deniability) on any positions of
political advocacy, as if revealing the unedifying truth of history would
more than suffice while allowing the critic cum cultural archaeologist
to disavow any suggestion that the message to his students was to go
out and man the barricades, when they did, in fact, go out and man
the barricades.15
What is striking about the ascendancy of theory, from the time
of Horkheimer and Adorno to its most dramatic degree of visibility
from the late 1960s into the 1990s, is that despite its dialectical and
1242 LEROY SEARLE

rhetorical sophistication and the severity of its abstractness, its appeal

has remained overwhelmingly practical as a source of (non-theologi-
cal) moral doctrine and example. It isn’t about what is true (despite
the mighty labor to deconstruct that concept), but about what is
right—which is exactly why its opponents, charged, in effect, with
being moral imbeciles, retaliated so successfully in dismissing theory
as Miss Manners on a Tear, interested only in “political correctness.”
But still, it is by no means obvious what it is that makes Theory theo-
retical. The acolytes of an older idiom may think that it is a telling
question concerning theory to ask, “Theory of what ?”—to which there
is still no convincing answer. It is just theory.16 And for the roughly
20 years between 1965 and 1985 and even to the present day, it was
embraced primarily as a continuation of a progressive movement
encompassing civil rights, feminism, and opposition to imperialist
wars,17 for which the much bruited post-modern critique of knowledge
is largely an alibi.
Derrida’s just claim to preeminence was in providing the essential
critical strategy in deconstruction, which, philosophically, cannot
be separated from his critique of Husserl’s phenomenology and his
concern for the implications of Heidegger’s radical interrogations of
Western metaphysics, but which, practically, consists in a technique
of reading that can be taught to an intelligent eighteen-year-old in
about two hours. The principle is simple: first identify the assump-
tions or presuppositions within an utterance or claim, and then apply
those very assumptions to the language in which the utterance or
claim is articulated. The result is richly productive of the startling
enlightenment of paradox, as in the evaluation of the sentence, “This
statement is false.” But unlike such blackboard examples, deconstruc-
tive paradox-making is radically open-ended and profoundly self-
­complicating, because starting from texts and ideas we have taken for
granted, it quickly reveals not only the already manifest difficulty of
pinning meaning down, but the truly startling degree to which our
intellectual lives depend on the unexamined, the unthought. In one
respect, this is only to acknowledge that criticism, and philosophy
in Derrida’s peculiarly Continental view of it, is inescapably dialecti-
cal, pretending to be rigorous and scientific but always falling short,
since it really does rest on the commonplaces of what people already
believe, whether these are well grounded or not. But in another way,
the coming of age of deconstruction felt like a new epoch because it
turned in upon any or all established beliefs—which is another way
of saying that it is dialectic turned to the undoing of dialectic—but
 M L N 1243

without really offering any genuinely new thought to replace it.18 One
obvious result is that deconstruction as a professional practice cannot
help repeating itself, to the point of crushing tedium. Derrida was able
to sustain that peculiarly French sense of scandal, dancing from theme
to theme while writing with the cool self-reflectiveness of a logical
analyst cum textual explicator who doesn’t worry about consistency
or contradictions because they are part of the language game already
consummately being played. But following on the new style inaugu-
rated by Horkheimer and Adorno, leading into Foucault’s divagations
across the whole field of social power, the combination is more than
just the birth of “post-structuralism,” or, following Lyotard’s broader
phrase, the “post-modern”: it is a very machine, first to show that any
subject whatsoever, from tattoos to the travel industry, is susceptible
of being treated as a “text,” followed by the rhetorical demonstration
that being a text it is therefore already guided by the hidden hand of
ideology, and is much to be suspected as up to no good.
Part of what I wish to argue here is that by the late 1980s, when
Theory was clearly in the ascendancy in literature departments every-
where, it was already well on its way to becoming canonical, with the
incorporation of ideas born in the wake of World War II, a teachable
set of rhetorical analytical strategies, and assignable anthologies (for
one of which I bear some responsibility)19 to disseminate studies exem-
plary not just for their intelligence but their style, and which, in the
aggregate, seemed to crystallize as a general and extensible doctrine
in favor of liberation and suspicious of all institutional power. The
difficulty in characterizing “Theory” without either a very long list
of approaches (such as Vincent Leitch dutifully provides in “Theory
Ends”) or letting it go with a shrug of the shoulders reflects the fact
that it has long since stopped being a new way to think and has become
an essentially corporate task of institutionalizing this generalized Cri-
tique of Power as itself the subject that should be taught as received
doctrine, and elaborated vigorously in all the changing shapes in
which it can be discerned. But just so, theory in its post-modern and
post-structuralist mode thereby takes on a role that bears a striking
resemblance to a secular form of religion, where even to question a
currently prevalent theoretical analysis of a privileged theme (like race
or gender, for example) is a certain way to be condemned, by way of
an older liberal vernacular, for being a racist or sexist.
From this point of view, the acute contemporary restiveness about
Theory—that it is not just fragmented but fractured, dead, at an end,
passé, that it has run out of steam, that it was a flash in the pan, and
1244 LEROY SEARLE

so on, ad nauseum 20—is perhaps nothing more than the recognition

that Theory has never been sufficiently theoretical and is itself axiologi-
cally saturated by moral principles that are themselves insulated from
criticism. That is what happens to any practice or body of texts that
attains a kind of de facto canonicity, and in ways we may have been a
little too slow to recognize, Theory has become too “literary” in the
sense that it has been taken up as a sort of story or drama on a set of
political and cultural themes (supplemented by personal memoirs by
theorists) that made philosophical critics feel either a little nervous
or positively outraged—while simply making the more conventional
literary types mad, as if they were being told, “If we have the Story of
Theory, what need is there for Literature?”
However this may be, for a good twenty years now, Theory has con-
tinued energetically, but like a bicyclist on an accelerating treadmill,
pumping ever faster just to stay even, with theorists talking mainly to
themselves and their graduate students by means of a truly alarming
escalation of rhetorical abstraction about familiar, even commonplace
ideas that absolutely require attention to practice. But none of this talk
has really opened up any particular pathway to constructive action,
and it certainly does not constitute a call to arms for revolution.
Instead, it devolves into a sequence of idiosyncratic projects, earnest
missionary ventures without the authority of a gospel and no funds at
all, and brave but short-lived efforts to apply The Critique to the latest
special population that may or may not want to be so incorporated.
To apply Foucault’s inescapable term, Theory has settled down into
a discursive practice suffering grave uncertainties about what it is for.
It has become not just, in de Man’s dismissive term, an “approach”
to literature, but a congeries of critical positions without a practical
compass or direction, a new genre without a general audience, and
almost entirely dependent on the recirculation of the same ideas
within the protected space of the university—while the citizens at
large put reactionaries in power term after term, in sublime indif-
ference to the trenchant insights of our Critique of Power, perfectly
consistent with an indifference, if not outright hostility, to any form
of critical thought at all.
Lest I be required to accuse (and recuse) myself for redundant
theory-bashing, the critical point is that even in its dogmatic slumbers,
Theory, The Critique, has mattered and still matters for ethical reasons:
it has touched us and excited us only as it has stayed in contact with
its living sources in the idea of justice. The decade-long disquiet on
 M L N 1245

both (all?) sides of the theoretical front is at root a justifiable anxiety

that neither Theory, wearing all of its hats, nor its antagonists, wearing
all of their coats, are responding to our actual historical predicament,
offering no idea at all of what we can or would or should affirm col-
lectively. Indeed not: for that is the function of the imaginative; that
is, after all, what literature is for.

*  *  *
If we are in a “post-modern” era, I would suggest that we need to push
its historical boundary with the Modern back a good deal farther than
1965, when literature departments were, relatively speaking, riding
high. In part, Theory was a bold play for intellectual respect and status
commensurable with the confirmed and budgeted status of literature
departments21 in the university as well as in civil society at large. It was
not exactly a “Take That C. P. Snow! We have Theory too” mentality, but
a more modest, a deeper conviction that the critical principles matur-
ing from their post-War roots had a rightness and even an historical
inevitability that needed to be heard and acknowledged. To be sure,
in that epoch, it did not feel that way: literature departments, within
the division of the Humanities, were then as now under-funded relative
to need, and inclined to play Rodney Dangerfield to themselves while
wheedling every possible dime out of the Dean, but the respect was
there, in the broad but fragile consensus that the Socratic function
of criticism in the humanities was legitimate despite being annoying
and unpleasant. Even while the war in Vietnam was raging, graduate
students by the thousands (myself among them) were recipients of
quite generous fellowships, under the National Defense Education Act,
which apparently provided more money for graduate support in the
humanities than any governmental program before or since. While
students then definitely appeared to their elders like the natives in
the bad old colonialist joke who were not merely “revolting,” but were
positively disgusting—what with the burning of bras, the burning of
flags, the burning of draft cards, in protest against the government
of the good guys who had fought to make the world safe for democ-
racy—they were more than merely tolerated. The protesters generally
prevailed largely because they gave voice and presence to the principle
that a civil society must genuinely open itself to criticism, including
toleration for civil disobedience on grounds of conscience. Old wounds
aside, moreover, almost every thinking person now recognizes that
the French were just as wrong in Algeria as the English were in India
1246 LEROY SEARLE

and South Africa, the Belgians in the Congo, or the United States in
Vietnam—not that it has prevented execrable folly in Iraq and who
knows where next.
To press the point farther, the very idea of a civil society, a self-
­governing society, as not only countenancing, but legitimizing resis-
tance and revolt, has roots far older than Thoreau and Gandhi,
reaching beyond the great modern revolutions in seventeenth-century
England and eighteenth-century America and France, to such ante-
cedents as the Peasant rebellion of 1381, the Magna Carta of 1215,
and farther still through the philosophical literature of Greece in
Sophocles and Aeschylus, to the oldest story in the Old Testament,
The Book of Job. The “post-modern” critique of power from the 1940s
to the 1980s, that is to say, drew its real strength from the essential
social idea of the West, contained in an unbroken discourse of justice,
uniquely shaped and maintained by imaginative and reflective writing
that presents to us the critical choice of whether to accede to tyranny
or to denounce it. Anyone who doubts that this discourse is, to say it
plainly, in trouble today has not been paying attention.
We trivialize theory by representing it to ourselves as something one
can be either for or against, and we do even graver damage to ourselves
by pretending that there could ever be a “return” to just teaching
literature as it used to be done. The wrong lies in succumbing either
way to the unthought, to the mere acquiescence in what happens to be
prevalent, going on teaching the same old courses that we were taught
(new wine in old bottles), or repeating the clichés of today without
really thinking through whether they meet and respond to the times
and circumstances in which we are teaching. On a recent day, upon
walking into the building where my department is housed, I overheard
an eager young graduate assistant, teaching one among the 60% of
undergraduate courses at my university now taught by part-time and
apprentice teachers, gathering her students around her while she
instructed them, outside the main office door, in the theory that this
building was actually “a prison,” exemplifying the ills of disciplinarity
and the principles of the panopticon as deliciously and irresistibly
elaborated by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish.
The fact that she was entirely wrong about the building, praised in
the early 60s for jamming more than 450 offices into a brick structure
on an extremely stingy footprint, where no one ever sees anyone else,
and no one is actually observed even doing nothing, is far less conse-
quential than the presumptive evidence that she very likely had no
idea, no thought at all, about the fact that the very condition of her
 M L N 1247

employment was part of a cycle of administrative and political feckless-

ness in literature departments that for forty years has been destroying
the prospects of her ever having a full time, tenured position anywhere.
The truth of the building lies not in Foucault’s extravagant and at best
semi-historical, semi-fictional conjectures, but in the failure to think
practically about the relation between the actual conditions of our
lives and our modes of thinking. The building cripples the people who
occupy it because it is so poorly imagined, so ill adapted to the actual
give and take between people that is essential to genuine education.
It is, in effect, a domicile for solitary confinement, and in exactly that
respect is an apt metaphor for what has happened to Theory rela-
tive to the civil society upon which it depends for its very conditions
of institutional existence. A rectangular cell block would almost be
preferable for housing a literature department because at least then
you might once in a while actually see your colleagues.
But the symptomatology of this chance event shows both why theory
has been so hard and yet so soft: those sweeping ideas, from Hork-
heimer and Adorno to Derrida and Foucault, got to be commonplaces
by way of a deep history, a specifically literary history, but when they
are just taken for True, as vehicles for ethical and moral conviction
without explicit attention to logic and consistency and craft, think-
ing turns into mere rhetorical calisthenics instead of engaged intel-
lectual work. That young instructor was all too representative, in that
contingent moment when perhaps she just wasn’t ready to teach her
class, but was fully alive with a conviction that is by all odds every bit
as important. The young people of our time, of her time, are literally
starving from an ethical hunger so deep that they will embrace stale
and preposterous ideas, from Marx to Nietzsche to Freud, especially
when packaged so aptly by Foucault, without considering that those are
ideas that have never yet failed to fail. What is not tolerable is feeling
oneself complicit in something shameful, something humiliating to
the very promise of being human.
In a very trenchant and telling analysis, now almost a decade old,
John Guillory took apart the institutional symptoms of this convic-
tion in his brief essay, “Preprofessionalism: What Graduate Students
Want”22 to show that it is, basically, a job. In his view, the escalation of
politically inflected theory as the cultural dominant of the Profession
was in actuality “driven by the increasing social marginality of literary
study, its increasing irrelevance to the socioeconomic conditions of
our society” (93). The pursuit of professionalism, the interminable
publication of essays that no one reads, of books needed to get tenure
1248 LEROY SEARLE

which no one, not even the libraries, buy23 is, in Guillory’s account, a
kind of a pyramid scheme of publication for its own sake, for survival
in a profession that has been under assault not only from elected
officials who must vote for the budgets (and really do not know what
we do and why it should matter) but from ourselves, unable to get
our own departments in order, as we keep on accepting more gradu-
ate students and producing PhDs (at the risk of sounding cynical)
at least as much to maintain a pool of cheap labor for the moment
(and a captive audience for our advanced research) as to provide well
trained teachers for the future.24
While Guillory’s is an argument with teeth, it misses in the most
fundamental way what graduate students not only want, but desperately
need: it is full-time work with real nobility of purpose. They want to be
aligned with the Good; they do not want to be involved with practices
that cannot stand the light of day, that humiliate or demean them, or
that degenerate into merest self-interest and cynicism. The Critique
has at least this far done its job, that no one under the age of thirty
could possibly have lived that long without having to engage in the
relentless deconstruction of whatever it was their parents and grand-
parents believed in, which has, to put it crudely, either turned to shit,
or become an object of faith that can be embraced only by turning
off your mind as the cost imposed for being Born Again. That young
woman teaching Foucault in the hallway belongs to a generation that
wants something to believe in, needs something to respect, something
that is neither intellectually reductive nor merely self-congratulatory.
Professionalism be damned: if all they wanted was a job, what would
ever have possessed them to pick literature, where the market sucks
(always has) and the pay is miserable (probably always will be). But
if Foucault can take on the outrage of punishment by revealing as
a novelist would—and make no mistake: it is as a novelist that he
writes—the experiential character of “discipline” by way of his electrify-
ing description of the drawing and quartering of Damiens, the regicide
that opens Discipline and Punish, then that kind of analysis can be in
turn applied to the multitude of happenings, from the language of the
law to the design of university buildings, all with the requisite feel of
the ethical, the real, the critical. But from this adoption of Foucault’s
achievement as a paradigm, to the practice of “normal criticism” as
the repetition of it on new objects, the imaginative energy and the
ethical life quickly seeps out of it, requiring ever greater exercises of
will to keep up momentum. When that happens, our students lose
interest in our courses because they can see right through them, and
 M L N 1249

we get shrill about Theory as if by requiring them to read more of

it, we can pound into their heads how vital it is. But Virtue is not a
subject you can teach directly, as every wave of Sophists, on their way
to becoming frauds and tyrants, have proved.
To repeat, the problem lies in the unthought, reflected in the
inherently dialectical character of critical debate. Dialectic, as Aris-
totle pointed out with devastating clarity, the “scientific” pretensions
of Hegel and Marx notwithstanding, always proceeds from common-
places, from what people already believe, or the “best people” or the
smartest people, believe, and hence can argue only to the juncture of
the discovery of a contradiction, but never, ever, arrives at demonstrative
knowledge or even an evidential sufficiency so as to compel, at the
cost of admitting one’s own irrationality or stupidity, that a particular
point under study is confirmed. There is no Derridean dance that can
charm this problem away, and no amount of repetition of a common-
place that we adopt for moral rather than intellectual reasons, that
can turn our beliefs into eternal verities.
The explanatory problem that remains, the genuinely theoretical
problem, lies in how it is that people came to believe whatever they
do believe in the first place. Having made so sweeping a claim for
justice as the very heart of our social discourse, the more demanding
task is to show in detail how it can come to be that anyone, anywhere,
for any reason, would have accepted the idea of justice as an Ideal.
Plato’s Republic, perhaps a little side-lined by its canonical status as a
Great Work of white philosophy, remains deeply troubling not for the
huge sweep of its philosophical imagination nor its equally huge ideo-
logical blind spots but in the startling fact that Plato never sufficiently
answers the violent objection of Thrasymachus that Justice is no pure
virtue of the soul, but consists in nothing more than “the advantage
of the stronger.”25 Plato manifestly thinks that his text is traveling the
Olympian heights when it is actually taking the dialectical low road,
to get the poets out of his way so that his Guardians, trained in the
verbal fisticuffs of dialectic and eristic, can replace the poets as the
Future Teachers of the Greeks.26
Put otherwise, the upward path of dialectic does not, after all, lead to
that pure intellectual intuition of form or eidos, but just to the polemi-
cal contention that the poets, being three degrees removed from the
truth, are as useless and irrelevant as even John Guillory in our day
seems ready to admit. Since it is transparent that mimesis is not just
the principle of poetry, but the sole and exclusive epistemological
principle of Plato’s theory of Forms, as the Visible is the mimesis of
1250 LEROY SEARLE

the Intelligible, it turns out that the most telling objection to Homer
comes down to this: he was not popular and was never in power. There is
no city that he ever governed, no record of rewards for his service, and
most singularly, no tradition that he had a following of disciplines who
would hang on his every word, as Socrates does in this unprecedented
all-night conversation that constitutes the Republic.27
What is at stake here is more than a lapse in self-reflective vigilance,
but a genuinely fundamental problem with the very idea of “theory”
that continues from Plato through all the generations up to and beyond
Derrida and Foucault. Now we call it the “logocentric metaphysics of
presence,” but it is nothing more than Plato’s belief in unmediated
intuition, which remains like an exhausted ghost haunting a graveyard
long after we had thought ourselves rid of it. The plain truth is that
we need a richer logic and a more ample theory of reality—and that
simply is not available on the shelves of your local bookstore in any
language. What we have had is a game of dialectical leap-frog that
banks everything on the escalation of rhetoric, compelled by the belief
that abstract reasoning (theory), having put the imaginative under
erasure (as merely “imaginary”), is the only tool we need. As Charles
Sanders Peirce charmingly put it, this is like “rummaging the garret of
the skull to find an enduring opinion about the Universe,”28 thereby
missing the most obvious feature of reality as we actually experience
it: it is orderly but dynamic and creative, and systematically produc-
tive of novelty.29
The problem here is that one may force a conclusion by dialectical
means, depending entirely on one’s agility with logic and rheto-
ric—without actually having compelled a change in belief. For that
requires, not force, not power, but the actual and active assent of the
other—which can only come by imagining concretely. It is a ferocious
irony in this respect that Plato had at least one thing right: the stories
that we tell ourselves and repeat to our children, which elicit our
admiration or provoke our loathing, are foundational for our subse-
quent judgment and provide, on an on-going basis, the indispensable
examples that we require for any practical moral thinking whatsoever.
The durability of Thrasymachus as a type, from the original of the
name, to the current administration in power in just about any nation
you can think of, derives from the fact that Plato’s unyielding conviction
that Justice has to be an eternal Form, an unchanging Truth, already
there in the super-empyrean realm just waiting for the dialectical
reasoner to discover it, is not the noble belief Plato thinks it is, but
a literal and pernicious falsehood. Not only that, it is nonsense. For
 M L N 1251

what abstract reasoning shows, time after time, is exactly what Thra-
symachus saw, and it is no accident that it is what Foucault adopts as
his story too. There is no inherent, no “essential” reason why, if one happens
to belong to the privileged class, ever to doubt the rightness of being who you
are. The enormous trap of identity politics lies in this circumstance,
that so long as you are fixated on yourself, you may be inclined to see
others as threatening to you, in the perfect conviction that while the
others are not OK, you are not only OK, you are without blame and
everybody else has just got it in for you. Not to put too fine a point
on it, this is ridiculous; and it leads us to treat exclusively as political
what is an essentially cultural problem, perpetuating a rhetoric of
blame and a psychology of victimhood that guarantees nothing can
or will ever be done about it.
My point is that a virtue like Justice is not transcendental, but imagi-
native: it is a truth which does not stay out there in the airless purity
of eternity waiting to be discovered: it has to be taught, it has to be
inculcated, it has to be nurtured and defended, and argued about, in
each and every single generation—or it dies. One can make a similar
argument concerning the soul, though at a greater metaphysical risk,
by contending for the rightness of the view that not only is the soul
not immortal, it can and often does die well in advance of the cessation
of bodily life, simply because it is not sustained and insisted upon as
a primary locus of our care.
The great contingency—and the arena, I believe, from which our
next compelling ideas are going to emerge—lies in the fact that without
the immediate and meticulous nurturing of the imagination as not
just one, but the fundamental faculty among our cognitive powers, the
very values upon which the vitality of both Theory and the idea of a
civil society have depended will wither away. After two generations of
heart-felt soul work on behalf of racial justice and the insistence on
fairness and equality for women, we now have perhaps even a plural-
ity of young women entering college who will positively flee from the
very notion of feminism as an ugly idea that will wreck their chances
with guys or require them to turn into an anonymous creature who
doesn’t care about her appearance—even as they express their belief
that women should have rights equal to men, so long as they don’t have
to tinker with their gender identity to get it.30 So too, we find young
people who think that racism is already over and done with, until you
scratch ever so slightly at the veneer of their opinions to find out how
much racial viciousness has already, long since, been incorporated
into their views of themselves. On questions of multiculturalism, it is
1252 LEROY SEARLE

stunningly instructive to ask young Latino men what they think about
Blacks or Koreans, or young African Americans what they believe about
Jews or homosexuals, or consider what the fans and performers of
hip-hop evidently think and say about women—and so on through
all the chapters and verses of High Theory since 1985. Young people
have heard what theory has been saying, but that does not mean they
are buying it, or even that they are genuinely thinking about it.
To state the point bluntly, by ignoring the imaginative as an essential
component in experience, or by treating it, following Pierre Bourdieu,
as identical with the “imaginary” where every question is framed in
terms of class envy and mimetic desire, we have failed to consider
what conditions of imaginative assent must have already been met
for people to espouse the very values upon which Theory itself abso-
lutely depends.31 It is, in a word, imaginative thinking, emphatically
not mimesis or following the script of one’s own subject position.
Having come for good reasons to suspect that the “literary object”
can be the hiding place of the worst of the demons of hegemonic
and elitist ideology, we run the risk of eliminating the very conditions
under which ordinary people might be able to imagine that when they
treat other people like objects, or speak to them without regard for
their feelings, it is not the justifiable assertion of one’s own rights,
but direct complicity with very evil they might otherwise believe they
are opposing.
So where is it that we learn this lesson? Is it from someone giving
us an accelerating barrage of abstractions or hectoring us about the
evil of the very institutions to which we owe our livelihoods? Certainly
not. We already know that belief doesn’t happen that way, just as we
know that any effective preaching is always done to the choir. For
unless you have already assented, you simply won’t be listening: you won’t
even be in the building. Put another way, without poetic justice, there
simply isn’t any justice at all. As William Carlos Williams writes in his
poem, “Of Asphodel, that Greeny Flower,” “it is difficult / to get the
news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack/ of
what is found there.”32 But this goes for theory too. The poem, the
story, the novel, the deeply moving memoir, calls us out as surely as
Althusser’s idea of ideology as an apparatus of the state, but with this
radical difference: we are summoned to think, to read, and to write,
in obedience to nothing other than the still unrealized promise of our
own common humanity. To the extent that theory cares about that, it
is indissolubly linked to the imaginative, and demoting aesthetically
compelling imaginative writing as merely part of the “imaginary” only
 M L N 1253

guarantees that theory will remain utterly illusory in its practical ambi-
tions, while the only students that will embrace it are the ones who
are already on board anyway.
As the practice of theory has become that which is prevalent in
literature departments, the very best thing about it is its practical
self-consciousness, its insistence that we hold our imaginative writers
(and ourselves) accountable for what they write, without ignoring,
for example, the sexism and racism in Shakespeare just because he is
our canonical literary deity or Inventor of the Human. But the worst
thing about it is the tendency to degenerate into dogma, treating the
writers we read as if they were automatons in the grip of ideology
and the material conditions of production (by the lights of whatever
theory we have adopted). Thus, from a movement that peaked only
when it did dare, in de Man’s phrase, to “call the act of writing into
question by relating it to its specific intent,” Theory has become a
mechanical archive of commonplaces and a toolbox of methods that
assumes from the start that it already knows the intent of writing: to
serve the interests of hegemonic capitalism and to oppress everyone
who is different.
The cost to us is enormous, in that we have trained a generation
of teachers to do “readings” using this or that theoretical approach,
leaving them more than a little unsure of what it would be like to
read what an author actually wrote, not with an eye to “theorizing” it
relative to a privileged model in contemporary discourse, but simply
to understanding what it says. While the sophistications of theory
reflect the difficulty of that task, they all too often obscure a more
radical truth: that the literary or imaginative is not in any meaning-
ful way an “object” but a primary mode of reflective thinking. It is
just as important as Kant, in his third critique, belatedly understood
it to be, as the very soul of our human intelligence. Its point is not
to define the form of beauty or the formlessness of the sublime, but
by reflective judgment to consider what things are for.33 Aesthetic
judgment, accordingly, is fundamental, not because it participates in
someone’s elitist idea of artistic finery but as the root suggests, because
it is grounded in aesthesis, in feeling as experienced, whereby we rely
upon our common sense as a way to resist the suasions of our common
understanding.34 Imaginative reflection is what we do precisely when we
are puzzled, when we are balked or baffled, and need to think, not
about how to get the cow into the barn or the money into the bank,
but about how to understand what is happening to us, what we are
doing, and why it is that some ways of doing it are shameful and not
1254 LEROY SEARLE

worthy of our powers and aspirations, whereas other ways of doing it

open up for us the vistas of a future that we can actually contemplate
entering into with anticipation and even joy.
The theoretical turn to suspicion of the literary follows on the mis-
take of turning great acts of writing into monuments that we set up
to venerate or just to “enjoy.” Writing doesn’t need to be worshipped,
but it does need to be read; and the pleasure in it is always acutely
mindful. When we acknowledge and accept the imaginative as a form
of thinking, a form of reasoning, set apart not because it is fictive or
merely pleasing, but because it is reflective, it is obvious that these
works expect more of us than passively “getting into” the book, but
require us actively and even athletically to think with it.35 The institu-
tional derailment that has happened to us, with the very success of
theory within our departments, consists in the supposition that the
doctrines of Theory could be treated as canonical and fundamentally
unchallengeable, just as the complacencies of formalism and struc-
turalism had tended to canonize and mystify the literary on formal
grounds. This is no choice but two instances of the same mistake, of
thinking that the transactions of literacy on either side could be made
permanent and unchanging. And it is of the utmost importance that
literacy, encompassing both the critical and the creative, is inescap-
ably secular, not sacred: there is, as Northrop Frye frequently insisted,
wonder in it, but no mystery and nothing mystical.36
The problem with formalism and structuralism did not lie in atten-
tion to form, but in the intellectual omission of not attending with
enough rigor to the function of the literary, the purpose of the imagina-
tive. This is another theoretical challenge that we have by no means
met. What is and must remain dialectical is the relation between the
critical and the imaginative, as complements that serve their social
function only when fully engaged with each other. My main point
is this: theory has drawn all its vitality from a commitment to the
idea of justice, but assent to that idea only happens imaginatively. If
we ignore the primary transformations of belief that can happen in
reading, we undermine the values and thereby the very ground upon
which theory depends.
The undercurrent of these remarks is that literature departments
are literature departments, and not adjuncts to political science or
cultural anthropology, precisely because the institutions of secular
literacy, which ground both our understanding and espousal of
such ideals as justice, start in and are continued through reflective
writing. But in that very conception, criticism or theory is not put
 M L N 1255

in a “secondary” position, but a vital role dialogically related to the

literary or imaginative.37 In a word, the relation between literature
and criticism is a tense and invigorating engagement with a much
broader process of cultural legitimation. The imaginative text, chosen
not because of some set of categorical properties it may or may not
have, is a site, a venue, for thinking that does not separate itself into
the misleading binaries of “subjective” vs. “objective,” or “theory” vs.
“practice,” or “elite” vs. “vernacular.” It is the essential experiment
upon ourselves, to see, through reading intently and exactly, what
practices, what stances relative to the world, what attitudes and values
actually can and do command our assent—and above all, with what
concrete practical effects?
Cultural legitimation, in this light, is everybody’s business, but the
central function of the literary and imaginative in it is no historical
accident. It is the formal recognition of the imperative of imagination
to project exactly, intelligently, feelingly, into the communal space
of a text 38 the very questions we must reflect on if we are not to let
our dogmatic certainties become absolutely destructive. Correspond-
ingly, criticism and theory are fueled by the insistent and at times
even aggressive demand not to make excuses for ourselves, not to
flatter our own ignorance or narrowness, not to fall into a thought-
less partiality for what pleases us or happens to conform to what we
presently believe.39
In a more directly practical register, a literary education is certainly
not a luxury, not a marginal enterprise or an invitation to defeat. It is
the most practical thing there is, flowing from a history that has the
capacity to see its own errors and the courage to imagine alternative
futures. That is the work of cultural legitimation, and it is counter-
hegemonic only and exactly to the extent that it remains undogmatic.
Our job is to teach ourselves, patiently, in every generation, to read
and write, to think and imagine, keeping all our faculties in free play
on the hard and intricate questions that concern us, precisely as the
act of writing renders them discussable. If Theory is dead, then we
need to say emphatically, “Long live theory,” as the form of thought
that takes the imaginative seriously, and begins the interminable
labor, like Blake’s Los building the city of Golgonooza, of repairing
the inevitable decay of the institutions that nevertheless sustain us in
a common life.
University of Washington
1256 LEROY SEARLE

NOTES

  1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John

Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). An earlier version of this paper
was presented as a lecture at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois.
  2 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, revised
and enlarged edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1977).
  3 Max Horkheimer, “The Social Function of Philosophy,” (1939), quoted in Critical
Theory since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State
UP, 1986) 693.
  4 See in particular, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin
(Cambridge: MIT, 1998); and Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1964; reissued 2000).
  5 So much so that people appear to think that there have always been English
departments, despite the fact that the first official English professor was a Scot,
Hugh Blair, at Edinburgh in 1762, or that the pioneering work on charting out
what we now call the ‘English major’ was done in the colonies, as at Presidency
College in Calcutta in the 1830s and ’40s, to the first formal English department
at the University of Rochester in 1847. The English were very slow in coming to
this party, with Oxford getting a course of study in English only in the 1890s and
Cambridge, not until the early decades of the twentieth century.
  6 For an even more acerbic rendering, see especially Wallace Douglas, “Deliberate
Exiles: The Social Roots of Agrarian Poetics,” in Aspects of American Poetry, ed.
R. Ludwig (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962). See also Leroy Searle, “The New
Criticism,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd edition,
eds. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 2005) 691–98.
  7 And there is reason, despite the demoralized state of the U.S. academic job mar-
ket and the inability of political progressives to win an election, notwithstanding
an all but unprecedented degree of incompetence and fecklessness on the part
of the reactionaries who do keep winning elections, to minimize the immediate
and practical importance of it. What happens in literature departments is in fact
not marginal, but a reflection of changes that we have great difficulty conceptu-
ally tracking perspicuously. At the moment, as Gayatri Spivak has argued (see
especially, “Teaching for the Times,” rpt. in Critical Theory since Plato, 3rd edition,
eds. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle [Boston: Wadsworth-Thomson, 2005]; and
Death of a Discipline [New York: Columbia UP, 2005]), the new emerging cultural
dominant in the United States is multi-racial, from widely diverse and divergence
cultures of origin, and that is, above all else, an imaginative fact. Moreover, the
electrifying spread of English as the language of international business, on grounds
and at a scale that Marx and Engels could not have even begun to imagine, has
created a condition in which, given such countries as India and China, there are
more people today studying English than speaking it as their native language,
world-wide.
  8 See Richard Ohmann and Wallace Douglas, English in America: A Radical View of
the Profession (New York: Oxford UP, 1976); and Evan Watkins, Work Time: English
Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989)
esp. 23–25. While Ohmann’s somewhat older style of radical consciousness was
concerned with the discrepancies between the profession and the society, Watkins
suggests the view that the ideological stakes in the work of English, following both
Gramsci and Althusser, warranted the view that English professors should conceive
of their work along lines similar to Gramsci’s “war of position” (16) within English
 M L N 1257

departments themselves, to shape the ideological impact of their labor specifically

as a form of political resistance.
  9 One of the earliest uses of the term “theory” was I. A. Richards’s remark that it
has consisted of “no small stock of prejudices, whimsies and crotchets, a profu-
sion of mysticism, a little genuine speculation, sundry stray inspirations, pregnant
hints, and random aperçus” in Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt,
1925) 6. Richards was roundly criticized for giving in to science or “scientism”
and making a fetish of “theory” by Ransom, Tate and others, who saw their work
primarily as a defense of traditional (and generally Christian) values. The accep-
tance of the term coincides generally with the explicitly secular development of
courses, following Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry
(1938), and particularly Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn (1947), with its appendix,
“The Problem of Belief and the Problem of Cognition”—though the issue is still
cast in such religious terms as “The Heresy of Paraphrase.” By the appearance of
Murray Krieger’s The New Apologists for Poetry (1952), the term “theory” was already
domesticated, to be reinforced and dramatically augmented by the adoption of
French models in the 1960s. For a view of the proliferation of “theory,” see Vincent
Leitch’s expansive taxonomy in “Theory Ends,” in Profession 2005 (New York: MLA,
2005) 122–28.
10 Jonathan Swift, Tale of a Tub, quoted from <http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/
etext03/tltb10.txt>.
11 Though it needs mentioning, there is no need to detail the paradoxical difficulty
here, that in claiming to know this truth about Truth, mystification starts all over
again in the view that the critic and more particularly, his or her ideologically
sophisticated critique of power, is well grounded and adequate to the work it
is supposed to do. What is especially important about this case, however, is that
Horkheimer and Adorno lead the way in this period in manifesting this kind of
performative paradox, in a mixed genre, where it is not at all clear what they are,
as philosophical critics, actually writing. No well-trained Continental academic
philosopher (expect perhaps Fichte on his manic days, or Nietzsche on his) ever
wrote this way. Foucault, however, mastered the genre and now it is imitated
everywhere.
12 Paul de Man, “Crisis and Criticism,” in Blindness and Insight: Studies in the Rhetoric of
Criticism, 2nd edition revised (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1983; first published,
1971) 8. See also de Man’s insightful analysis of Husserl’s The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (14–16).
13 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage
(New Haven: Yale UP, 1970).
14 See in this context de Man’s Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P,
1986), especially the title essay.
15 See, in this context, Gayatri Spivak’s pointed remarks concerning Derrida and
Deleuze, in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Cul-
ture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1988), esp.
271–76.
16 In the rich genesis of this bit of discursive practice, the emergence in late Marx-
ism of the phrase “social theory,” particularly via Marcuse and later by British
socialist critics including Raymond Williams, followed by Terry Eagleton, merges
with distinctively French philosophical criticism aptly described as “intellectual
theory” in a brief but indispensable essay by Jean-François Revel, “Intellectual
Fashions,” The Center Magazine 6.1 ( Jan. 1973): 4–6. Revel deftly documents the
appeal of this discourse by cautioning against viewing it as simply an intellectual
fashion, a view common enough then as now, to point out that such movements
1258 LEROY SEARLE

spread rapidly (like fashion) because they offer to the initiate a source of “global
explanations” that do not require arduous disciplinary training or the mastery of
complex bodies of evidence, but greatly facilitate the wide discussion of topics of
current, and usually urgent interest. We should remark, however, that this is quite
precisely the insight of Aristotle concerning the appeal and the inherent limitation
of dialectic, detailed throughout his Topics and Sophistical Refutations. See also, for
a very concise summary of the problem, Wlad Godzich’s “Introduction: Literacy
and the Struggle for Theory” in The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1994) 1–34.
17 See, for example Carolyn Allen’s “Feminist Criticism and Postmodernism” in
Tracing Literary Theory, ed. Joseph Natoli (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1987).
18 I have treated these issues at somewhat greater length in “Introduction: The
Modern Era,” in Critical Theory since Plato: 621–38. In a very different vein, see
Gayatri Sprivak’s A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing
Present (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999).
19 I.e., Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, eds., Critical Theory since 1965.
20 See, as a tiny sample, the following litanies of regret, lament, and consternation
over Theory, its prospects and effects: Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory; Bill
Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996); Alvin Kernan,
ed., What’s Happened to the Humanities? (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997); Antoine
Compagnon, Le Démon de la théorie: Littérature et sens commun (Paris: Editions
du Seuil, 1998), trans. by Carol Cosman as Literature, Theory and Common Sense
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004); Judith Butler, John Guillory, Kendall Thomas,
eds., What’s Left of Theory: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory (New York:
Routledge, 2000); Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP,
2003); Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Kurt Spellmeyer,
Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-First Century (Albany: SUNY,
2003), especially chapter 6, “The Wages of Theory”; Stephen Metcalf, “The Death
of Literary Theory,” Slate Nov. 17, 2005; Jennifer Howard, “The Fragmentation of
Theory,” Chronicle of Higher Education 52.17 (Dec. 16, 2005): A12; Lindsay Waters,
“Literary Aesthetics: the Very Idea,” Chronicle of Higher Education 52.17 (Dec. 16,
2005): B6. A common motif in these and other commentaries is that the discom-
fort over theory ought not to be construed as either a dismissal of it, or in Terry
Eagleton’s terms concerning the “end of high theory,” that “the whole project was
a ghastly mistake on which some merciful soul has now blown the whistle, so that
we can all go back to what we were doing before Ferdinand de Saussure heaved
over the horizon” (1–2). But on the other hand, there is certainly no consensus
that what theory has meant (in Eagleton’s words) is “systematic reflection on
our guiding assumptions.” For another common motif is voiced with less wit and
more cynicism in Stephen Metcalf’s assertion that “No one knows what an English
professor does. In waking up each day only to rejustify their entire existence—to
jealous colleagues, to class-shopping undergraduates, to the administrative purse
strings—professors of literature invoke the literary past in whatever way will most
advance their own institutional self-interest.” Among the multiple factions one
might find in a contemporary literature department, the underlying reality may
be, rather, that the members of the factions may know not only what they are
doing, but go forth with great ferventness of will in the conviction that it is right;
but finding it hard to convince even their colleagues, to say nothing of the pub-
lic at large, that it matters, are most likely to redouble their efforts in the belief
that they are warring with powers of wickedness, not that their ideas are simply
unconvincing or unsubstantiated.
21 In the department where I now teach, for example, there were in the early 70s
roughly 80 tenure track faculty. Now there are 51. The student load in all Eng-
 M L N 1259

lish courses has not significantly diminished (though English Majors are down
from about 1200 to roughly 450) but what has happened is that almost all of the
sophomore level literature courses are, and have been for years, taught by 2nd
and 3rd year Graduate Teaching assistants.
22 John Gullory, “Preprofessionalism: What Graduate Students Want,” in Profession
1996 (New York: MLA, 1996), 91–99.
23 See, for example, Lindsay Waters’s sobering comments in Enemies of Promise: Publish-
ing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2004) on the
ongoing decline in book buying even by libraries, which together with the current
tax laws on inventory held for sale, puts the average sale of university press books,
almost all of which are printed with the aid of subvention, at under 300 copies
before they are remaindered. In the same context belongs the unprecedented
presidential letter to the membership of the MLA from Stephen Greenblatt about
four or five years ago concerning the crisis in book publication in the humanities,
which directly affects the ability of our junior colleagues to get tenure. They just
have to publish a book—and it is in far too many cases, a middling dissertation
dished up as a book that answers to no compelling need and will not be read in
any case. It is in every way a self-destructive syndrome.
24 The point is not advanced cynically, but just to foreground the undeniable fact
that any concrete action or even a plan of action for regulating the size of our
graduate programs would have to tackle the intractably difficult problem of who
would teach the courses we presently require of students—and if that should
change, who is up to the task of re-imagining our curriculum and its associated
pedagogy so that we could be clear about our educational purposes.
25 See Republic I: 336b–354b in Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961).
26 I am alluding here to the argument of Eric Havelock, in Preface to Plato (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1963).
27 See Republic X: 599b–600e. The whole of this remarkable indictment should be
consulted, which in outline (following Shorey’s translation in The Collected Dialogues
ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, 824–25), runs roughly as follows: If
Homer had “genuine knowledge” he would have endeavored “to leave after him
many noble deeds and memorials of himself”; and while it is excusable for him to
err on minor arts (as detailed, for example, in Ion), on “the greatest and finest of
things” of which Homer speaks, “wars and generalship and the administration of
cities and the education of men,” the question is “what city was better governed
owing to you” and “what city credits you with having been a good legislator . . . ?”
There are none. Socrates goes on to ask “is there any tradition of a war in Homer’s
time that was well conducted by his command or counsel?” None: as there are
no “ingenious inventions for the arts and business of life” reported of Homer as
there are of Thales and Anacharsis. Neither is there any “public service” or ac-
tion as “a guide in education to men who took pleasure in associating with him.”
Indeed, the dominant tradition is that “Homer was completely neglected in his
own lifetime.” In brief, Homer is a loser by every measure Plato’s Socrates can,
in this supremely revealing moment, think to apply.
28 Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in Collected Papers, ed. Charles
Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1931–35) 5.382, n.1.
29 This does not imply, as Plato feared, a collapse back into the chaotic flux of
Heraclitus any more than it necessitates embracing philosophical relativism. The
problem is, rather, that what is systematic in nature are its principles of relation
(a point central to the pragmatism of Peirce), not the continuance of nature’s
forms nor the syntax of our languages.
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30 See especially Toril Moi, “‘I am Not a Feminist, But . . .’: How Feminism Became
the F-Word,” PMLA 121.5 (Oct. 2006): 1735–41.
31 See the related point concerning the actual texts of theory John Guillory pursues
in his chapter, “Literature after Theory” in Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary
Canon Formation (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1993): “There is . . . evidence to suggest
that cultural studies’ new ‘opening’ of the syllabus to popular or mass cultural
works has been accompanied by a closure of the syllabus to the same High Cultural
philosophical texts which were so important to the dissemination of theory. Such
a cultural studies syllabus would certainly not be inclusive of cultural products
generally.”
32 “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” in Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, ed.
Christopher McGowan (New York: New Directions, 1988) Vol. II, 318.
33 The point here is crucial, for it goes against the grain of most aestheticist readings
of the third critique, which pass over Kant’s distinction between the determinative
and the reflective judgment, which is necessary for Kant to locate the a priori
principle of the faculty of judgment itself. To be brief, the Critique of Judgment
is not about art but about us, in that our intelligence can only be satisfied with
understanding anything when we are able to understand its purpose, its intent.
This is the pivotal passage, commonly omitted in anthologies of literary criticism
and aesthetics: “Now the concept of an object, so far as it contains the ground of
the actuality of this object, is the purpose; and the agreement of a thing with that
constitution of things which is only possible according to purposes is called the
purposiveness of its form. Thus the principle of judgment, in respect of the form
of things of nature under empirical laws generally, is the purposiveness of nature in
its variety. That is, nature is represented by means of this concept as if an under-
standing contained the ground of the unity of the variety of its empirical laws.”
Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951). (This passage
is, however, included in Critical Theory since Plato on p. 419.) The peculiar and
confusing locution concerning “the ground of the actuality of this object” simply
means that we do not understand until we know the basis on which something
was made.
34 These also are terms often overlooked in Critique of Judgment, where Kant contrasts
them to insist that the common understanding is the complex of concepts in which
we have grown up, whereas common sense derives from what we all bodily share.
Thus his assertion that the aesthetic judgment is a common sense aligns it with
sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing, not with the particular conventionalities
by which works of art at any epoch might happen to be observed. See especially
Part I, sections 20–21, pp. 74–75.
35 See especially Walt Whitman’s injunction in Democratic Vistas: “Books are to be
call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half
sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to
do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct
indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the
hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the
complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of
supple and athletic minds, well-train’d, intuitive, used to depend on themselves,
and not on a few coteries of writers.” Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected
Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (Library of America, 1982) 992–93.
36 See, for example, Fables of Identity (New York: Harcourt, 1963), and Anatomy of Criti-
cism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957), especially Essay Two: “Theory of Symbols,”
115–28.
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37 See, for example, Wei Zhi Gao, Creative Criticism: the Example of James Joyce, diss., U
of Washington, 2006.
38 To underscore the point, the importance of the text is precisely its intentionality,
that it is deliberately conceived of and carefully made, wherein considerations
of genre, figuration, patterning and structure are not ‘local irrelevant details,’
to borrow an old phrase from John Crowe Ransom. We have let this slip from
supposing that the so-called “intentional fallacy” is settled doctrine, as only a pale
anticipation of the deconstructive principle of the infinite deferral of meaning, and
not the confused and inconsistent piece of polemic that it has always been. The
problem lies in distinguishing (or failing to distinguish) between intent as purpose
and meaning as what we actually understand, by failing to hold carefully in mind
that meaning isn’t a property of words or discourse, but a result of construing,
interpreting, and comprehending what is written. Meaning, that is to say, is an
event. To understand the intent of writing is to understand its purpose—even if
one is mistaken or partly mistaken in how one understands what it says. It might
serve better rhetorically to say, simply, that the text is in every way deliberate,
careful, aware of itself and its purposes, and as a text, is explicitly consultable. We
can argue about it precisely because that is what it invites and may even require.
Cf. Leroy F. Searle, “Text and Theory in Contemporary Criticism,” in Voice, Text,
Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies, eds. Raimonda Modiano, Leroy F.
Searle, and Peter Shillingsburg (Seattle: U Washington P, 2004), 3–21; and my
“Textual Integrity/Textual Authority: The Cultural Importance of Editorial Ethics,”
in the forthcoming proceedings from the Textual Authority Seminar, at Jagellonian
University, Krakow, Poland, 2005–06.
39 Here, it may even be worth quoting a bumper sticker: “Don’t believe everything
you think.”