On Sidestepping the Political

James Liner (bio)
University of Washington Tacoma

A review of Potts, Jason and Daniel Stout, eds., Theory Aside. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Print.

We all know better than to believe that the complex history of theory (to say nothing of its present) can be reduced to a sequence of compartmentalized, oversimplified schools and movements or a roster of celebrated proper names—and yet our pedagogy and even, at times, our scholarship continue to perpetuate a caricatured account of the life and times of Theory. In Jason Potts and Daniel Stout’s view in Theory Aside, the reification of the history of theory and of the theory canon results to a significant degree from the political and philosophical aspirations shared broadly among theorists and critics since the 1960s: “the desire for unprecedented intellectual transformation itself built a tendency toward canonicity into theory from the very beginning” (2). Potts and Stout’s new collection of essays pursues the worthy goal of calling theoretical and critical attention to the marginalia of theory—those historiographies, methodologies, and individual figures that have for various reasons been left to the side of the theory canon: “What … would our intellectual landscape look like if we were less beholden to the idea of wholesale change? … What intellectual options has [the] demand for radical alteration left by the wayside?” (3). In an age when it has become commonplace to pronounce the death of Theory as a discrete discipline, the essays in Theory Aside narrate a new history (and present) of theory that draws on unexpected sources, revises our understanding of the usual suspects, and introduces new questions that mainstream, canonical theory has forgotten or failed to ask. This search for theoretical alternatives is salutary.

Moreover, Theory Aside pursues these goals without simply rejecting theoretical inquiry and retreating into the traditionally conceived disciplines. Although some critics have recently turned away from theory and toward the comforting, familiar disciplinary terrain of literary form and belletristic literature, the contributors reject this move. Moreover, they tend to do so partly on the grounds that it fails to provide workable, livable alternatives to the neoliberal corporate university. For example, in “Late Exercises in Minimal Affirmatives,” Anne-Lise François critiques a relaxation of critical rigor that she finds in the late work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, William Empson, and Roland Barthes. Historicizing her critique of these three theorists, François sees an “uneasy proximity of a certain qualified emphasis on ease of access and concomitant futility of effort … to the seemingly similar emphases on ease, effortlessness, instantaneity, precarity, and unskilled labor defining late capitalism in the electronic age” (49). The relaxation she identifies in Sedgwick, Empson, and Barthes thus finds a more recent echo in Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s 2009 call for critics to turn from ideological depths to textual surfaces (see Best and Marcus, esp. 9–19). This agenda proposes that critics abandon models of criticism predicated on laborious ideology critique in order to focus on what’s already there on the surface of the text (Marcus calls it “just reading” [75]). However, a return to the text itself may look like an alternative to high theory, but it hardly counts as a workable alternative or a means of defending a discipline on the grounds of its distinctiveness: on the contrary, François suggests that such retreat will merely exacerbate the casualization of academic labor in the corporate university.

François is not alone in linking labor conditions to the project of proposing theoretical alternatives. In “What Cinema Wasn’t: Animating Film Theory’s Double Blind Spot,” an interrogation of North American film theory’s relative silence concerning the role of animation in the historiography and interpretation of cinema, Karen Beckman likewise acknowledges the need for alternative theoretical approaches that remain cognizant of the constraints faced by academic labor. Translating André Bazin’s work on animation, for example, would be one clear remedy for the “blind spot” Beckman identifies, yet as she points out, the economic realities of academic labor confound such an easy solution, precisely because of the pressure on scholars to publish original monographs and articles rather than translations (189). Beckman’s innovative solution is to propose a different kind of translational work, in which film theorists dialogue not just about but also with animation “practitioners” in a broadly collaborative, interdisciplinary theoretical approach that contrasts starkly with calls for narrowly disciplinary, antitheoretical formalism (192; see 190–92).

Interdisciplinary collaboration and methodological pluralism reappear elsewhere in the collection as remedies to blind spots produced by a retreat to the traditionally conceived disciplines. For example, in “Archive Favor: African American Literature before and after Theory,” Jordan Alexander Stein rereads the role of bibliographic and archival work in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and calls for an expansion of what counts as literary scholarship. When Gates’s The Signifying Monkey appeared in 1988, it faced a double bind determined by its historical moment: on the one hand, Gates’s study was a monumental effort in recovering lost African American texts, but on the other hand, it continually elevated its theoretical aspirations at the expense of its traditional bibliographic scholarship, the latter almost becoming a source of embarrassment for Gates-the-high-theorist (165). Rather than perpetuate this inherited value system that views critical bibliography as a debased or outdated avocation and regards questions of history or materiality as inferior to those of aesthetics, Stein calls for theorists to take up “the challenges that come with accounting for and narrating the work of literary studies in plural terms” (173). Methodological pluralism, he contends, encourages recognition “that no scholar is or could become an interdisciplinary research project unto herself” and that interdisciplinary collaboration is not just desirable but necessary in a time when institutional pressures are driving scholars into disciplinary foxholes (173–74).

The same methodological pluralism appears in several of the other essays in the collection. For example, Heather Love’s “Reading the Social: Erving Goffman and Sexuality Studies” calls on scholars in sexuality studies and queer theory to revisit the work of the sociologist Goffman. Arguing that Goffman has had a hitherto unacknowledged influence on queer theory, Love shows how Goffman’s methodology “ignores the distinction between text and world, enlisting literature as well as other narrative and fictional forms in the service of describing social dynamics and their reinscription of hierarchy” (241). For Love, this blurring of traditional disciplinary boundaries allows Goffman to approach familiar theoretical terrain—the thesis that identities are socially constructed—but this time from the position of “a socially grounded account of performativity” rather than the more familiar “linguistically oriented” one (245). Thus, Goffman not only exhibits the methodological pluralism celebrated by contributors to Theory Aside but also provides an empirical view on the phenomenology of sexually marginalized subjectivities.

Love and Stein are thus exemplary of one of the chief virtues of Theory Aside: Love’s addition of Goffman to the historiography of theory, and Stein’s reevaluation of discounted critical methods in Gates, speak to the importance of maintaining theory’s interdisciplinarity when the very enterprise of theory, as traditionally understood, is increasingly devalued (along with the humanities in general) by a university system that prioritizes careerist education and commodified research. One viable response to the attack on theory is to demonstrate its unexpected vitality in places we wouldn’t think to find it and to show the surprising benefits of interdisciplinary research programs that fruitfully combine theory with other fields and methods.

In addition to modeling interdisciplinarity and methodological pluralism, Love and Stein also contribute to the collection’s second crucial project: revising the theory canon and rethinking processes of canonization. Love does this by making a compelling case for broadening our notion of the theory canon, while Stein reveals often unseen methodological tactics in a canonical theorist. However, the collection’s most dramatic and surprising challenge to the inherited canon comes from Frances Ferguson, who reads I. A. Richards against the grain of New Criticism, with which Richards is most closely associated. New Criticism regards the literary text as sufficient unto itself, the archetypal illustration being Keats’s well-wrought Grecian urn. In “Our I. A. Richards Moment: The Machine and Its Adjustments,” Ferguson claims thatliterary criticism for Richards is comprised of “statements of consciousness or subjective statements” that “relate to [literary or aesthetic] objects themselves only in an oblique and variable fashion” (264). This is anathema to the doctrinaire New Critic, for whom the text transcends such contingencies as the proclivities of individual flesh-and-blood readers, the circumstances of an act of reading, or even history itself. For Richards, as described by Ferguson, literary meaning is neither transcendent nor eternal; to the extent that it arises from concrete, subjective experiences of reading a text, it is just as historical and “susceptible to change” as any other human experience (266). Ferguson’s concluding comments on Richards’s Practical Criticism—which collects, analyzes, and compares interpretations offered by his undergraduate students—underscore the distance between Richards’s theoretical assumptions and the canonical tenets of New Criticism: “Richards’s informants treat the poets behind the poems as if they had motives that can only be described as social motives, and they respond as social beings…. [T]hey demonstrate how little the reading of poetry actually participates in a distinct and autonomous world” (276). As Ferguson reads him, Richards could hardly be further from the self-effacing reverence for the work (not text) associated with the New Criticism—and the understanding of theory canonicity that emerges from Ferguson’s essay and others could hardly be further from the conventional narrative. Such rereadings call radically into question any pretense to theoretical or methodological purity, highlighting as they do the inevitable entanglement of formal with sociohistorical analysis, the humanities with its disciplinary others, and the conceptual and intelligible with the material and the contingent.

For all its merits, however, Theory Aside has crucial limitations as well. Significantly, many of these stem from the modest ambitions staked out in Potts and Stout’s abnegation of theory’s claims on revolution. One consequence of their rejection of theory’s “strongly interventionist ambitions” and “compulsion toward radical transformation” (2, 3) is that it is not always clear what changes as a result of a given reading or why a reading matters outside its immediate context. For example, “What Is Historical Poetics?”, Simon Jarvis’s impressive reading of poetic virtuosity in Alexander Pope, is grounded in a reading of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and begins from the premise (recognizable in a different form to readers of Fredric Jameson) that literary form itself is always already historical: “what if ‘formalism’ were already ‘historical poetics’?” (98). Yet it remains somewhat unclear how the essay is intended to contribute beyond its specific focus on Pope and Adorno, and this despite both the virtuosity of Jarvis’s own technical analysis of Pope’s poetics and his provocative statement that form is the “most intimately historical aspect” of a “work of art,” the “most vulnerable to becoming obsolete or to missing its moment” (101). The likeliest larger context for Jarvis’s argument is aesthetic experience itself, but Jarvis regrettably leaves untheorized his key aesthetic term, “delight.” The essay thus misses an opportunity to theorize its concepts in a way that enables further critical intervention or theoretical elaboration. Potts and Stout’s deliberately limited claims on behalf of theory seem here to rein in theoretical and critical energies that might otherwise multiply beyond Pope and Adorno.

William Flesch’s “Hyperbolic Discounting and Intertemporal Bargaining” is a similar case. Derived from his analysis of the behavioral economist George Ainslie, Flesch’s readings of the phenomenology of narrative time and the relation between reader and text are interesting and insightful, but the essay leaves important implications underdeveloped. His conclusion teases the reader—reading “is real life: someone else is presenting us the fiction”; it is “intersubjective to the core…, even when we are most solitary” (213)—without delivering on the promises for a social or political account of the experience of reading that such claims seem to suggest. In these instances, the essays appear to butt up against limits posed by the collection’s programmatic modesty.

More troubling, however, is Theory Aside’s occasional neutralization of the political. There are moments when the volume’s modesty translates into an outright disavowal of the perennially political vocation of most theory. Potts and Stout present Michael Hardt’s call for “militancy” rather than “critique” as one instance of the “exclusively revolutionary” trajectory of theory that they hold partly responsible for pushing aside the conversations represented by these essays (4). For Hardt, mere critique is “the art of not being governed so much,” whereas his more radical model of “militancy seeks … to govern differently, creating a new life and a new world” (qtd. 7). For an illustration of why a radical theorist might be dissatisfied with theorizing that remains content with ameliorative reform, one need only look to “The Biopolitics of Recognition: Making Female Subjects of Globalization,” Pheng Cheah’s essay on women sex workers’ subjectivity under neoliberal globalization. Dismissing rather quickly the Marxian tradition of ideology critique (without, however, attending to the various transformations of the concept of ideology under Marx’s inheritors [127–28]), Cheah’s essay essentially acquiesces to neoliberal globalization, notwithstanding his productive use of Foucault’s classic analysis of biopower and biopolitics. In the concluding pages, Cheah writes: “With the decline of socialism as a genuine alternative, the only way forward is for countries to play the competitive game of developing human capital and the recognition of human rights within the framework of global capitalist accumulation…. [W]e cannot not want to be part of this system of creating useful human beings even if this makes us susceptible to being used” (137, 139). Being governed is a foregone conclusion here; capitulation is “the only way forward.” Cheah’s argument precludes the possibility even of utopian hope, let alone revolutionary praxis. One might reasonably excuse Hardt and other Marxists if this strikes them as rather beside the point of theory.

While in many ways Cheah’s exclusion of revolutionary praxis is the exception in Theory Aside, it is precisely this exceptionalism that reveals the collection’s most significant programmatic flaw: the essays tend to be at their most insightful at those moments when they are furthest from the modest aims articulated in the introduction. Beckman’s exhortations concerning the place of animation in film studies also carry with them the ambitious goal of “catalyz[ing] full-scale conceptual reorganizations” of the discipline as a whole (183). Even further from Potts and Stout’s rejection of high theory’s lofty claims is the politics of noncontemporaneity developed by Natalie Melas in “Comparative Noncontemporaneities: C. L. R. James and Ernst Bloch.” Melas finds in James’s The Black Jacobins (1938) “a noncontemporaneity of the future” which “flips the noncontemporaneity of racial backwardness over to the vanguardist noncontemporaneity of a future revolution” (69). This noncontemporaneity anachronistically links the historical Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) with the coming postcolonial revolutions in Africa that constituted James’s future: “the past intrudes into the present as a trace of the future” (69). As Melas reads him, James clearly aims at something fundamentally other and more than being governed differently. Similarly, Elizabeth Povinelli, in her study of the relation between liberal biopower and critical theory titled “On Suicide and Other Forms of Social Extinguishment,” calls on theorists to “act even though the world in which our actions would have made maximal sense will be extinguished at the moment of our success, its cardinal measure subsumed by a new world” (91). This, of course, is precisely what revolutionary praxis itself does: it acts in this world to create a new one.

Nowhere is the contradiction clearer between the collection’s modest program and its ambitious achievements, however, than in “Needing to Know (:) Theory / Afterwords,” the closing statement by Ian Balfour. Balfour begins with what is probably the volume’s grandest sweeping gesture: “To be antitheory is to be anti-intellectual” (280). The boldness of this opening move corresponds to the magnitude of Balfour’s claims for the necessity of theory: “theory is always at work…. It is thus not a question of whether to do theory, whether to take sides for or against it, but only a question of how one does it” (280). Although this sentiment is clearly shared among the essay’s contributors in various ways, what is unique in Balfour’s treatment is the powerful conviction—which elsewhere occasionally seems more like lip service—that theory’s new directions necessarily require that we enlarge the canon of theory without abandoning canonical proper names, that we continue rather than curtail critical traditions associated with revolution and political critique, and that we widen the scope of theory, not narrow its focus:

We find ourselves in a precarious moment when it comes to what might be considered a brand new totality. No sooner had we finished learning the hard lesson of poststructuralism that absolutely everything was under the sway of difference (still true), when the need to know the totality … impressed itself in the world and on the scene of world theory and any number of seemingly local analyses. Jameson has been the most eloquent proponent of ‘back to totality’…. But the imperative now presents itself categorically. To everyone. (282–83)

Balfour’s defense of theory stands less as a bookend than as a rejoinder to the introduction’s bracketing of revolutionary ambition. Whereas Potts and Stout make their focus the margins and minutiae of theory and decry high theory’s reliance on “the proper name” (1), Balfour’s afterword has theory squarely confronting the social totality itself—the same global capitalism against which Cheah proposes we are powerless—by means of two (essentially) proper names, poststructuralism and Jameson. Here and elsewhere, essays in Theory Aside have the most to offer theory and theorists when they are least faithful to the collection’s intentions.

Nonetheless, Theory Aside usefully contributes to important theoretical questions, local and global, in a variety of ways. Although turning aside sometimes means turning away, the volume’s true strength lies in theorizing otherwise, approaching established figures or questions in new ways, complicating them rather than foreclosing them. As Povinelli puts it, “The question critical theory asks is what releases one or another of these potential otherwises into the actual” (89). The best essays here aim to release the potential otherwises of theory into a newly expansive and transformed canon of theory.

Works Cited

• Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” The Way We Read Now. Ed. Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best with Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood. Representations 108 (2009): 1–21. Web. 22 April 2011.
• Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.