Theory’s Emperor

How can in interpretive theory

Isn’t that supposed to be “How can an interpretive theory…”

Strange error to occur when copy and pasting a quote.

A topic of some inerest but the post hardly begins to answer why this scam took off in American universities. Youngish begging academics discovered that they had to publish to get tenure and promoted but that the same stuff being said repeatedly in the same jurnals and so sought new niche to post (or paste) new “insights.” With newish theory, stuff not previously done over here, they could open new enclaves for their publications. Evolution got into play and new journals and then Net places opened to become “cutting edge” locations for the new game in town.

In the humanities, you change the game when the players become stars and rule the roost, and so you begin a new game with your rules for this new game and presto! you are ahead of the curve. Of course, though, as whatshisname noted, it lasts but 15 minutes–but the academy, slow to change, gave it a longer life before moving on to cultrual studies.

It lasts but 15 minutes and destroys your discipline in the process.

As English studies became progressively un-moored from the studies of history, languages, aesthetics and rhetoric, only about 2 percent of students chose to major in English, so I am told.

But perhaps it was never a good idea in the first place.

I got another one: The Bureaucratization of Cafe Culture- French intellectuals in the US.
“Deconstruction was an answer to a disciplinary crisis,” wrote Ms. Lamont. “The legitimacy of literature departments had been consistently weakened by the increased pressure for academic research oriented toward social needs.”

Don’t blame the Euros for more than being seduced. American academic rationalism tries to turn everything into science, literary theory became the “objective” political science of poetry. Now we have the theory of literature as methodological individualism: total perversion. Keep the frame invisible.
“social needs?” No. Neoliberalism all around, including the academic defenders of theory.

Well, Fred, if you’re going to blame (or credit) the drive to be new and innovative in modern language departments for the adoption of post-structuralism and its various bastard children, you’re really going to have to peg nineteenth-century Germans and the idea of the humanities research university.

People in France is pissed off because Slavoj Zizek is so famous in the US without being French (although blatantly cutting and pasting form French stuff).

Fred (#4) with due respect to the enthusiastic grad students who assembled that web page, one can do better. For a set of introductions written for undergrads by a scholar who knows the relevant literatures in some depth, I would suggest Mary Klages’ notes here: http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/lecturelinks.html

Floyd, from a brief inspection, Lamont’s article is less philistine than Kieran’s introduction makes it sound.

In my opinion Derida is more known in USA than in France.
Deleuze and Foucault maybe too, although less.

The culture of academic intellectualism in the US is based very much on a desire to sever those connections

The US has no culture, only shopping, so status is the most important thing. I’m sure that the performance of status is a universal concern, but I’m always amused when I meet academics who ape British manners and slang.

Sad.
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Interesting article, especially from a deconstructive viewpoint. Her idea, which is simply assumed, is that one can talk of cultural ‘goods’ being transmitted in a cultural market – which is all very well, except that that metaphor carries a lot of presuppositions with it. Is there anything like market clearing in this market? How can one talk about a market, which seems to give us a model of cultural goods that is unmoored from truth values, on the one hand, and then use the dumb cliche, the “land of empiricism” to talk of the highly religious, ideological, and at best pragmatic United States? She oscillates between using field and market, as though they were interchangeable terms – while at the same time treating, non-empirically, the intellectual “market” of cultural goods in France in the early 60s, when Derrida’s work was being published in Critique, in separation from, well, the major events of that era – the end of the colonial war in Algeria, for instance. It seems to escape her notice that, uh, Derrida comes from Algeria. And it seems to escape her notice that American academia in the sixties was the locus of much discussion about a little war back then, the Vietnam war.
The interestesting thing about that article is how it caters to the prejudices of sociologists, expecially the science enviy – hence the borrowing of metaphors from economics that are incompletely thought through, but do, accumulatively, disguise the Cold war realities of the academic institutions they are supposed to illuminate. All in all, a petty poor piece of work. One would think that, using Boudieu, it would occur to her that the early prominence of Derrida is probably less explained by starting with Saussure than by starting with Levi Strauss, at that time at the peak of his renown – who was the target of Derrida’s first critique pieces, and who was portrayed, by Derrida, very much as an intellectual working in a colonialist context.

Still, the smugness of the market half model, or of phrases about the US being the land of empiricism surely appealed to the appropriate prejudices in the 80s, that golden age of Reaganism.

My favorite take on this was in a recent issue of N+1, which argued that Theory had taken the place of the literary novel. When you think of it as art rather than scholarship it all makes more sense.

Having read a little of the transcript from Mitt Romney’s much-anticipated speech today, I can’t help but wonder if it was written with something like this.
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“In my opinion Derida is more known in USA than in France.” I’d second this. There was an article in Le Monde, I think, a while back trying to explain why Derrida is so popular in America.

Sorry about your coffee Loren, but actually the differences between Derrida and a lot analytic philosophy of language isn’t that serious. They’re both dealing w/ language as a rule governed system in which the speaking subject is decentered (this is part of the point of a causal-chain theory of reference). And I don’t think it’s an accident that Derrida has had significantly greater influence in the humanities than Kripke or Putnam or Wittgenstein. The lessons he draws from a decentered speaking subject are simply more relevant to the kind of questions academics in humanities ask.

Steve, in lieu of debating whether or not Derrida is more important than Wittgenstein or Kripke (influence in humanities departments isn’t in dispute), I’ll instead share this link to a dispute about authorship that maybe a Derrida would have found amusing, in some possible world.

15: In fact, I’ve been looking for her quote for years.

Don’t have that one, but a related fun quote from Her Profundity – turns out you don’t even have to read anything:

Hollywood Bible movies of the 50’s, like “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben-Hur,” with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more truth about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the best American higher education.

“Nor would I call Deconstruction “a scam.” I find Derrida to be every bit as credible a thinker as Wittgenstein or Kripke, and honestly, a lot more important than both of them.”

Man , now I got tea over everything. You can not possibly be serious, because Derrida is not only a terrible reader of philosophers like Plato and Nietzsche ( carelessly lifting passages out of context and making up stuff ), but he consistently misunderstands their philosophical arguments.

As if this was not enough, the man also comes across as a complete bullshitter because he conceals this intellectual recklessness and weak argumentation ( and a lack of originality I might add ) with a theoretical framework.

Derrida takes skepticism and gives it a linguistic twist (nothing outside the text = we cannot KNOW beyond our own sensations), fuses that to a an interpretive strategy that derives from Nietsche but can be found earlier (in Francis Bacon, a little bit, for example), and markets the whole thing as a way to launch a revolution from your arm chair. I don’t think he’s a terrific philosopher, but if you are put off by his stylistic quirks you miss the connections to “mainstream” philosophy that DO exist in his works. For example, you can fruitfully compare Ds notion of the self to Hume’s bundle theory, Carnap’s “no ownership theory”, maybe even to Quine’s version of the self insofar as that is articulated. People forget that analytic/Continental philosophies only branched off about 100 years ago. Previously, Husserl might have read James and vice versa.

I frankly think it was his marketing of the whole product that made him famous and, I think, he was never as famous in France as he was in America. There they had multiple pomos vying for rock-star status.

The idea that Derrida is somehow a minor figure in French philosophy as the french do it is pretty silly. What, you think the French philosophers look back at the sixties as the Golden age of Bouveresse and Granger? The people who come up with these objections usually have trouble coming up with one French philosopher who the French ‘flocked’ to in the sixties besides the usual crew.

It was, of course, one of the fatal methodological mistakes of the Lamont’s paper that she did not compare Derrida with any other philosopher, thus giving us no sense of the bars to entry for a philosophical career, which is the only use for her silly ‘market’ metaphor. A better way of understanding Derrida’s career, from the purely formal, Bourdeuian model she is employing would be gained by looking at the other people who were published in, say, the issues of Critique that published the first chapters of On Grammatology and seeing how they fared in the transatlantic world. But that would take work – far better to ask some friends at a dinner party to name ten french philosophers and then write it up as a survey.

The group from the sixties – Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, to some extent Althusser and Balibar, Badiou, Serres – are to French philosophy pretty much what the American philosophers of that generation – Davidson, Putnam, Kripke, Rawls, et al – are to American philosophy – a constant reference. Of course, someone like, say, Joelle Proust is going to refer to Anglosphere work, just as an American phenomenologist is going to refer to Continental philosophers. In general, though, it is just not true by the usual parameter of scholarly influence – citation – that Derrida, Foucault, et all are minor figures in France in any way. Even someone hostile to Derrida – say, Vincent Descombes – would concede as much. In fact, one of the major centers of philosophy in France at the present time, College internationale de philosophie, was pretty much founded by Derrida. It has become one of those prestige heavy places in France where the olympians go, like College de France, to which it is now affiliated.