Freedom Theory

Yesterday's online edition of the New York Times contains a review by Stanley Fish of François Cusset's history of French theory in these United States, to be published in English early next month. Fish takes the opportunity to survey the fate of transplanted Gallic innovation from his privileged vantage point from the ivory tower's pinnacle, and concludes with Cusset that, in the hands of American practitioners, these various imported "-isms" (Fish focuses mainly on deconstruction) became the very things that their originators abhorred: political instruments to be brandished at a stultifying status quo in the name of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Funny thing is, though, these instruments — particularly deconstruction — proved ill-suited to the tasks to which they were turned, for the principle governing deconstruction, as well as French theory generally, is that a definite position — on anything — is the hobgoblin of little minds. French theory could certainly deconstruct the political assertions of the status quo, but it could not construct an alternative to them in their place. The misguided attempt to do so on the part of leftist American intellectuals, Fish writes, has led to an enfeebling, permanent saturnalia:

But, Cusset observes, “Americans do not take kindly to things being impossible,” and even though the “very logic of French theoretical texts prohibits certain uses of them,” they have not refrained from “taking a criticism of all methods of putting texts to work and trying to put them to work.” The result is the story Cusset tells about the past 40 years. A bunch of people threatening all kinds of subversion by means that couldn’t possibly produce it, and a bunch on the other side taking them at their word and waging cultural war. Not comedy, not tragedy, more like farce, but farce with consequences. Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie.

Fish strikes a keynote usually associated with departmental fuddy-duddies that literature and the humanities has collapsed into a babble of political tongues, ones of such limited application that they seldom apply to any more than a few individuals, and perhaps to only one individual in many cases, viz., the whole phenomenon of identity politics.

The irony of this all, as I see it, is that precisely in its refusal to admit that when we talk about the world its actually the world that we talk about, and not some prior discourse about the world, French theory has contributed to a refashioning of the academic world in its own image and likeness as a fractious, anarchic place — a bellum omnia contra omnes of agendas and egos — never again to find the sweetness and light of common endeavor or purpose.