Offering Theory. John Mowitt
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the sentiment found in Nietzsche’s stinging aphorism (number 298) from the first volume of Human All Too Human: “In every party there is someone whose far too credulous expression of the party’s principles provokes others to defect” (Nietzsche 2010, 198). Regardless of whether Nietzsche is his source, Adorno’s “devotee” is arguably the Doppelgänger of the thinker who knows how to assimilate tradition by “hating it properly.” Frankly, I am not especially concerned here to sort the matter of influence. Instead, the point is to situate Theory in the context of a thinking—as my title clearly suggests—about how its offering participates in the logic of devotion challenged by Adorno. More particularly, in a straightforwardly pedagogical mood, my discussion and the readings that follow explore, within the semantic resonances of “offering,” how one might work with Theory so as to, as it were, sacrifice it properly. Drawing initially on Terry Eagleton and Giorgio Agamben I consider here how Theory is exposed, even risked through its offering, and examine what grasp of Theory emerges from thinking its offering as an act of sacrifice. Theory not as on offer, but Theory as offering, or as I will propose, Theory as “giving a reading.” How does one handle that? When and where does that handling take place?
Not long ago the medievalist Andrew Cole told us everything we do not need to know about the “birth” of Theory. A more emphatic and thus persuasive account of why Theory ought not be profiled, that is, handled, as having an identity would be hard to imagine. And, so as not to be misunderstood, Cole’s text is a really good one. However, as with any sort of achievement it exacts a price and here this takes the form of the text’s seduction. His text is properly seductive in that it leads one astray—thinking here of Freud’s Verführung, whether actual or not. More directly, what concerns me in Cole’s approach is its devotional tone, a tone that manifests not only in his historicism but in his conviction that Theory is best grasped as exhibiting an identity. So as to cut to the proverbial chase, in order to sacrifice theory properly, it must not be profiled, it must not be given an identity that one can “historicize” or not. This is especially important when thinking about handling theory in the diffuse era of “the peace,” that is, in the moment that has survived the Theory Wars, a moment, I will argue, during which Theory obliges us to be thoughtful about when and where we handle it, especially now that Theory has been reduced to a cinder, a glowing coal.
Perhaps then a more direct if less immediate interlocutor here is the late Wolfgang Iser, whose How to Do Theory, with its explicitly pedagogical orientation, falls more squarely in the path of these reflections. What Iser and Cole share—and Cole makes only a passing reference to him—is the inclination to treat Theory as a type, a genre of academic discourse. Iser’s text is textbook-like in its effort to demonstrate not how various theoretical traditions ought be applied to objects of scholarly attention (although a bit of this occurs), but how theoretical traditions might be taken in their own right as objects of scholarly attention and, decisively, presented in the context of the graduate or undergraduate classroom. The organization of his study says it all: Chapter 2, Phenomenological Theory; Chapter 3, Hermeneutical Theory; Chapter 5, Reception Theory (no surprise) and so on, culminating in a postscript dedicated to “Postcolonial Discourse” (not Theory) represented by Edward Said. In his preface Iser somewhat nervously distances himself from his text by stressing its commissioned status and by noting the more or less persistent coaxing of his editor to do this or that. Anyone who has published a book will know that Iser is not making this up. Editors do behave this way. But the issue here is not who actually wrote the text, but rather of what is its existence a sign? To respond succinctly: its existence symptomatizes the typecasting, the “profiling” of Theory. As his introductory chapter makes plain: Theory is now (it was written in 1992!) something academic intellectuals can’t avoid, so we might as well be clear about how to do it. To be frank, I actually think “do” is the most provocative word in Iser’s title for the attention it directs to the practice of offering and if I am dissatisfied with his text, and I am, it is because he doesn’t do enough with “do,” starting with the problem of treating it as a verb that simply precedes a noun. Doing Theory shields Theory from the doing, so as to set Theory off from the work of doing, of offering. Put differently, Iser wants us to understand different types of Theory so as to offer them competently, he does not want to offer them theoretically, almost certainly a sure path to a low score on RateMyProfessors.com.
If earlier I invoked a certain “necro-political” tone in the debate over Theory it was with an eye toward commenting upon the “marketing history” of what I have called “the peace.” Consider then the following “facts,” aware that one needs to resist taking the evidentiary force of chronology at face value.
In 1983 the University of Minnesota Press, published Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction. A witty, well-informed and unabashedly left-leaning survey of those traditions within critical theory that had transformed the study of literary texts, this book quickly emerged as the best-selling title at the press, surpassing sales of so-called regional books about life in and around Minnesota. Its sales were directly indexed to the book’s wide adoption for use in classroom instruction, testifying to the perception among educators that “literary theory” mattered as an offering within the hallowed halls of higher education. Iser’s text is obviously modeled on it; indeed its implicit rejoinder is: yes, yes, but how does one do it?
In 2003 Eagleton published, now at Basic Books (a trade press), After Theory, an equally witty, but far more mean-spirited description of the fate of Theory (no longer simply literary theory) in the early years of the new century. Although not exactly rife with self-loathing, After Theory hardened Literary Theory’s left leanings, recasting its survey as a form of blood sport in which theoretical propositions about society, culture and the economy that resisted the implicit authority of a certain anti-Soviet orthodoxy were deemed “bloodless,” pale shades and thus worthy of the oblivion into which the context of the new century was said to be consigning them. The title thus resonated not only as an anodyne historical descriptor but also as a command to a pack of dogs.
Five years later in 2008, the University of Minnesota Press published what was called the 25th anniversary edition of Literary Theory: An Introduction to which Eagleton had added an “Afterword.” This last was written more in the spirit of his warm valediction to Jacques Derrida who had passed in October of 2004, a statement pitched almost directly against the sanctimonious obituary for Derrida published by the New York Times where it was proclaimed that with Derrida’s demise the “theory of everything” was now dead. Without exactly calling off the dogs, Eagleton was here thinking after Theory in a less distempered way.
Now, let me quickly correct some false impressions. This is not really about Terry Eagleton. It is not about the press that publishes the academic journal that I edit. It is not even about the first two decades of my professional career. It is about what, in a plainly melodramatic register, we could call the fate of Theory, and here not merely literary theory. If one accepts that print capitalism is one of the decisive materializations of Theory, then the dates I have recorded matter in tracing an alternate version of what Said sought to capture in his influential essay, “Traveling Theory,” namely, the slackening or attenuation of the perceived urgency of theoretical reflection in both the humanities and the social sciences. Again, in a somewhat awkward rhetorical register, these dates mark the passing of Theory as witnessed from the vantage point of a partisan with a trans-Atlantic audience. Although their differences are legion, Eagleton and Iser share the conviction that Theory, unlike many theorists themselves, has a life. It is the type of thing that has a life span, and a finite one at that. Time’s up.
We come then to the proverbial heart of the matter. Namely, what should or even can we do with the Theory that has passed, whose condition is curiously “chronic”? As my opening paragraphs will have clarified, the strategy of deepening our devotion to this discursive identity is not a viable option. In their most piquant manifestations such strategies manifest as cockfights spurred by the schoolyard idiom of: “is so, is not,” or, in Gerald Graff’s more sober idiom, “the conflicts.” Are those of us who embrace the materialization of Theory that manifests in university curricula, in pedagogical practice, left with no other option than to reanimate and defend a corpus whose expiration date has