You can't peruse academic blogs of late without having been either hit over the head with the discussion of the new/retro text Theory's Empire or without having been sucked into the maelstrom that is the Valve, self-proclaimed literary organ. So many participants are engaged in this "conversation" (I use the term very loosely) that it's impossible to begin a round-up of all the valuable contributions, but to make a very long dialogue very short, suffice it to say that the debate centers around whether theory (whatever that is) has come, gone, and died, and whether or not those left at its wake should be celebrating their new freedom or mourning its passing.
I'm not sure what to say about this sort of debate. I have always been what folks like to call a "theory boy," someone interested in those names that often get listed under the moniker "French Theory" or "Poststructuralism" (this doesn't always work, given the folks I read and reference with regularity, but it comes close enough), or as someone who is just more interested in abstraction than in practice. Personally I never understood the distinction. Derrida, Nancy, Foucault, Agamben, etc. - these people have always treated thinking as innately practical, intimately bonded with the practices of everyday life. For me if any split exists, it's not the one supposedly at work between theory and practice, but between "reading" and what might be called "philosophizing." Derrida, for example, hardly ever postulates or pontificates in the absence of a text'; his work is grounded in the practice of reading, and if the texts he chooses are not ones most folks would consider practical, he chooses them nevertheless because of their particular practices. Nancy, on the other hand, spends most of his time elaborating a position grounded on a thinking through (or beyond) certain concepts in the philosophical tradition, and he rarely uses specific texts as direct sources of invention.
But that split isn't what matters in the debate over Theory's Empire, nor does it mark the stakes of that debate. Taken in the debate's own terms, what matters is whether or not humanities scholarship should continue to fall prey to a certain seductiveness of abstract, esoteric, and purposefully difficult thinking. I don't personally agree with this assessment of "theory," but let's just accept it as a common, if disparaging, characterization and take it for what it's worth. It's a caricature that has more currency in my particular field (rhetorical studies originating from a public address perspective, NCA style) than it might in, say, rhetoric and composition circles. So, leaving aside all the politics already at work in the characterization, let's consider this reception, and its triumph in light of its effects, which is to say, as a question of pedagogy.
Why else have the discussion over theory? Why else spend time and resources to profess theory's end and its attendant dangers (the tension between these two "professions" has not been lost on those participating in the funereal exchange) simultaneously if not to provide a model of appropriate pedagogy, of what qualifies as worthy of being taught, and in so doing, of defining what qualifies as being learnt? It is this task that should have us pausing and taking a step back to evaluate the rhetorical situation, the context to which this conversation finds itself contributing, intentionally or otherwise.
Now we can spend time declaring, as so many have and continue to do, that conventional liberal arts education no longer benefits from theoretical enterprises - whatever "theoretical" here entails - and that now the so-called liberal arts actually suffer from these sorts of abstractions. We can also spend time lauding theory's historical benefits, its role in opening the canon, introducing new problematics and new themes, and in paving new avenues for thinking resistance in the era of supposedly late capitalism. Both of these have their place, but neither grapples with one of the major challenges we in the Academy face today: the collapse of the liberal arts educational model and the apotheosis of a scientistic, test-based approach to measuring and parsing educational progress. The Leave No Child Behind act - often dubbed the Leave All Children Behind act - celebrates nothing but practice, nothing but data sets. With it, the economies that delimit education in the United States are increasingly overdetermined by a confluence of three forces:
- The modification of a curriculum that teaches material in order to maximize student performance on standardized exams. This means that alternate ways of exploring classroom education, of learning material not covered by the tests, or of testing in ways out of step with the standardized materials actually provide an opportunity cost that discourages their adoption and use: namely, they distract from the opportunity to teach students exactly (and only) what they need to know to demonstrate the school's ability to teach what the new "accountability" tests measure. This system also shifts resources away from advanced courses - given limited funding opportunities and diminishing state and federal financial backing, efforts have to be spent on the common denominator that will determine success on the school's AYB.
- A set of corporate and political interests that coincide to produce the tests and the guides that assist students in passing them (Neil Bush, btw, fortuitously banked on education and is now making money off the NCLB act). With teachers forced to teach to the test material, the test producers have an incredible and unprecedented ability to shape students' common knowledge base.
- A metric marked by memorization and isolated types of problem solving rather than creative and critical thinking, and then couples this metric with a harsh and punitive sanction regime. This is the scientistic necessity of the sorts of tests celebrated by the act and enshrined in the yearly accountability standards that determine school funding. In a handful of years, colleges will be flush with undergraduates who have had even more limited exposure to critical thought. And yet, this is what theory does best, providing models for just the sort of critical thought sorely lacking in students already. Should they arrive even less prepared, hoping to be "taught to the test" in the manner they are growing accustomed, well, what is being called "theory" will be even harder to present to our would-be business majors, glibly passing through their requisite liberal arts classes before going on to their future corporate lives.
With this situation in mind, there has never been more of a time to celebrate theory, to teach theory, to encourage philosophy and abstraction and practices that need not be tethered to some measure of their practicality. This isn't the time to celebrate theory's end; rather this is the time to work strenuously for its resurrection, or to sit down for a seance with the theory version of the Goddess. It is no coincidence that Derrida spent so much of his career working in GREPH to advance the high school curriculum by promoting a "right to philosophy," which in the context of the discussion of Theory's Empire might as well be renamed the "right to theory."
Highlighting the absurdity of the division between theory and practice is an important step, a necessary one, but it is insufficient. Taken on its own terms, advocates of theory must also "impact turn" the characterization of theory itself. The seductions of theory need to be celebrated for their sexiness, not just highlighted for their artifice and straw-argument potential.