The kind of theory I was taught in college had a big aura. It was a chic kind of theory, a French kind of theory, one entwined with hipster and bohemian aesthetics, with “female effacement” (Johnson 2014:27), with things postmodern or poststructuralist, with American whiteness, and with a barely repressed spirit of commodification and elite competition. In the American university context, this theoretical competition was readily entangled with clumsy masculine ambition and ersatz intersubjectivity, as one can see from a late-1990s satirical song about dating at Swarthmore College.

The song, “Theory Boys,” began:

Comes on the scene in a sharp wool coat
Bright eyes, hair a little too long and big teeth
Wanna strip away the phrases he recites by rote
Wanna find out what’s underneath

Don’t want to talk about anything I think I know
It won’t take long to see I’m hopelessly outclassed
And when you finally get him home
Has he got what it takes to last you?

One of these days I’m gonna have to get away from theory boys
One of these days I’m gonna have to get away from theory boys
When they read Foucault for fun
That’s when you know it’s time to run! If they’re so much
Smarter than me, why do they act so dumb?

[Fein 1998]

Let us dwell on “Theory Boys” for a moment, since its lyrics convey a whole theoretical world. The theory boy’s theory was a prestige object, used not in the service of any collective politics, but as part of a masculine bildungsroman which was nothing if not cringeworthy. In the song’s scenario, the theory boy was a bad boyfriend because he not only thought he knew everything, he also sought to make you feel inferior in the face of his knowledge, distilled from obsessive readings of fetishized male philosophers — Foucault and, as another verse notes, Nietzsche. Today one would call him a mansplainer, and his ostensibly subversive cultural knowledge was not to be mistaken for actual thinking. On the contrary, it consisted essentially of rote formulas that may, nevertheless, have channeled genuine existential angst. “Man is mortal, life is pointless, God is dead and stuff,” was the summary of his views offered in the fourth verse by the composer, Elizabeth Fein, who went on to become a psychological anthropologist. The theory boy was a connoisseur of yesterday’s philosophical dissidents in France and Germany, and what he sensed as radical chic was really a palimpsest of yesterday’s academic imperialisms, now eclipsed by the United States’ ascendant academic industries. Meanwhile he protected his expertise by avoiding his interlocutor’s domains of knowledge; he privileged his own verbal prowess over sexual reciprocity with his partner; and he aspired to style by practicing Francophile bobo consumerism, notably, as the third verse notes, by binging on coffee and cigarettes.

Methodologically, the point is that theory was enmeshed in a system of angsty patriarchy and frustrated desire. It was not that the theory boy definitively preferred the literary androgyny of French theory to the embodied femininity of his partner, since being a theory boy was clearly his coy sexual strategy.[1] In the libidinal economy of the song, the theory boy automagically constitutes an object of desire for the woman protagonist. He seems enticing in spite or because of his repulsive and excessive qualities, which give her desire for him a certain masochistic quality. In this, her desire mirrors his: the desire for theory is itself a masochistic desire, because who but a masochist (in this view) would be dumb enough to read Foucault for fun (Kulick 2006)? Just as the girl never gets what she wants from the boy yet can’t quit him, so too, it would seem, does the boy never get real knowledge from Foucault, but can’t stop reading him. The three of them enter into a paraphilic love triangle, where a girl chases a boy who chases a book, which in turn androgynously embodies both the masculinity of philosophical authority and the aesthetic femininity of French culture. Yet all the while, by the song’s account, the theory boy remains oddly trapped in himself, and in his barely intelligible code: “At least he can speak his own language—no-one else knows how.”

We could say that the theory boy’s theory becomes a fetish object, in a libidinally charged though not directly sexual sense. The objects of fetishistic desire (paraphilia), whose inanimacy affords them a welcome stability and predictability, can play a powerful function in stabilizing libidinal economies (Berlant 2012).[2] Fetishes serve at once to comfort and alienate, interfering with easy fantasies of subjective sovereignty. For the fetishist is not self-sufficient, he needs the object; he is not in control, but neither is he obliged to swallow too much intersubjectivity, since his desire can be satisfied by a substitute; and ironically, his very lack of sovereignty can make new things possible.

Now the “theory boy” is obviously a specific social type, and an idealized one at that. He is not a stand-in for Anglophone critical theory at large; he is neither an Angela Davis nor a Herbert Marcuse, neither a Barbara Johnson nor a Sara Ahmed. But in the instabilities which afflict him as he tends his theory fetish, he represents a political dead end whose implications reach far beyond the narrow confines of American elite college culture. If the unfinished global legacies of twentieth century radicalism show anything, it is that dialectical fantasies of a happy merger between revolutionary subject and revolutionary theory have generally proven unrealizable.[3] “Theory” in its post-sixties sense has consequently often been in a bad relationship with politics — as my French interlocutors sometimes complained — and this fraughtness is inseparable from its potential to become an academic fetish object.[4]

Still, it is not my view, either in this case or in general, that theory (itself a highly historically mutable category) is a fetish by nature. It is merely analytically important that, at certain historical moments, it can become one. Meanwhile, no one would mistake Theory Boy for a utopian: he is too dogmatically affirmative about theory for that, and too hostile to other human beings. But his masculinist fetish of theory has the merit of showing a deep connection between patriarchal desire and the forms of objectification that continue to organize the theory universe. This has been only too apparent to women — and no doubt invisible to too many men.

Notes

[1] It is an ideological curiosity that French culture is strongly gendered female in American public culture (whether in terms of fashion and beauty products, of Paris as a love space/object, in terms of France’s military and economic inferiority to Britain and America since the 19th century, or in terms of its artistic and intellectual movements). It is intriguingly compatible with France’s general femininity-for-America that French Theory was often deeply masculine and male-dominated. For more on the ambiguous gendering of French national self-representations, see Cooper (2000), or on gender in French philosophy, Le Doeuff (2003).

[2] As Berlant puts it, “The fetish enables desire to be controlled, to be manageable, to be comprehended, signified, and also screened out by the material form. Moreover, the fetish has no uniqueness nor singularity, like the penis; it can always be possessed, reproduced, replaced, and collected. Thus it encompasses value and valuelessness, and construes desire through aggression and protectiveness” (2012:34).

[3] I think here of the unactualized fate of Firestone’s revolutionary Marxist feminism, or Biko’s subject of Black Consciousness, or even Lukacs’s theory of the revolutionary proletariat (which may not be the Ur-form of this fantasy but certainly traces an extreme version of its failure).

[4] Aijaz Ahmad comments even more pessimistically than me that “It is also arguable… that dominant strains within this ‘theory’, as it has unfolded after the movements of the 1960s were essentially over, have been mobilized to domesticate, in institutional ways, the very forms of political dissent which those movements had sought to foreground, to displace an activist culture with a textual culture, to combat the more uncompromising critiques of existing cultures of the literary profession with a new mystique of leftish professionalism, and to reformulate in a postmodernist direction questions which had previously been associated with a broadly Marxist politics” (1992:1)

References

• Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso.
• Berlant, Lauren. 2012. Desire/Love. Brooklyn: Punctum Press.
• Cooper, Nikki. 2000. (En)Gendering Indochina: Feminisation and female figurings in French colonial discourses. Women’s Studies International Forum 23(6):749-759.
• Le Doeuff, Michèle. 2003. The Sex of Knowing. New York: Routledge.
• Fein, Elizabeth. 2017 [1998]. “Theory Boys.” Swarthmore College Alumni Songbook, 2017 Edition. Pp. 7. Swarthmore, PA: Swarthmore Folk.
• Kulick, Don. 2006. Theory in Furs: Masochist Anthropology. Current Anthropology 47(6):933-952.
• Johnson, Barbara. 2014. A life with Mary Shelley. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

The seminar was taught by Jeff Williams, an English professor who I’ve been in touch with for fifteen years. We’re in pretty different fields, and a generation apart in age, but we’ve shared this odd interest in writing critically about academic culture. It’s a weird, great feeling to be around like-minded academics, and to get reminded that there’s solidarity in specialization. After you work on your tiny specialized research project for a long time, you can start to feel increasingly closed in on yourself. Then it’s nice to be reminded that solitude is just one moment in a thought process.

Anyway, in Jeff’s seminar, I tried to explain how I came to work in France. I explained that a lot of French “theory” had actually produced by this particular Philosophy Department (at Paris 8), and I explained that I’d come to write about it as an institution permeated by utopianism and ambivalence (not to mention disciplinary masculinism and a complex relation to the postcolonial world).

After I had gone on extemporaneously for a while, the room felt a little hushed, because it was eight at night. So I asked if we could go around and have each person ask a question. (I was afraid that not everyone would speak if we didn’t have something structured.) And people asked such great questions, it turned out, that I wanted to write them up here, to remember them, and honor them a little.

Here they are:

• How do you collect your data? Who did you talk to?
• Coming back to this country from France, what’s your opinion of the U.S. system?
• What did you teach in South Africa?
• How does anthropology relate to literary studies?
• What’s the connection between philosophy in France and theory in the USA?
• You do ethnography — what do you make of how ethnography fits into cultural studies?
• What’s your writing process for your book?
• We heard a lot about your ambivalence. Where’s your hope and positive investments?
• You’ve been in three very different higher education systems — France, USA, South Africa — what are French and South African universities like?
• What do you still idealize?
• How do you position yourself in academic space? Where do you fit in?
• Who is your audience? Do you intend to suggest a remedy to ambivalence?
• What surprised you in South Africa? In France?
• You criticize the places that you inhabit in academia. What happens when you’re negative about your own institutions? What are the implications of that for you?

(All these are paraphrased from my notes.)

Some of these are just really interesting comparative questions that I wouldn’t have thought of. Some bring up points that have a lot of existential stakes for me. And some just remind me that any time you try to talk outside of your field, you partly need to explain the basics of your field. (What is ethnography anyway?)

I couldn’t really answer all these questions (without writing another book probably), so I felt like I had been given a gift I couldn’t entirely reciprocate.

At the same time, there were more questions I had wanted to ask the class — questions about the feelings that go with theory and academic life, mostly. They were things like:

• What are things about academic life that surprise you? What seems logical or illogical about university institutions?
• What’s it like to be a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon? What do you make of “theory” in literary studies?
• Have you ever had a thought you couldn’t express? Or (conversely) have you encountered academic texts you couldn’t make sense of?
• What’s your experience of the relationship between academic texts and everyday life? When does academic writing speak to your life and when does it feel disconnected?

Next time I do something like this, I’ll have to leave more time for more discussion of this sort of theoretical consciousness…

* What is a career but a debatable interpretation of a series of biographical accidents?

Richard Wolin, in “America’s Tolerance for French Radicalism,” attempts to describe the complementary histories of French poststructuralism in France and America. Making no distinction between the American nation and American academic culture, he argues that american pluralism and “democracy’s historical strengths” made it possible to assimilate post-structuralism as “merely another framework to choose from amid the ever-expanding marketplace of ideas.” Let’s leave aside the claims that America is democratic and pluralistic through and through, and that our intellectual world forms a free marketplace. These platitudes need not detain us. What’s more interesting is the claim that the intellectual world is “ever-expanding.” Here we have a more complex spatio-temporal image of the intellectual world: to be ever-expanding is to be growing in space as it progresses through time.

This sounds like a coy analogy with the astronomers’ hypothesis of an ever-expanding universe. Yet while Wolin apparently imagines the expanding marketplace of ideas as an endless intellectual bounty, the astronomers have envisioned a world whose infinite expansion will end not in unlimited light, but in indefinite cold and darkness. We might ask Wolin, is an endless marketplace really anything but a stultifying dream? And there’s something more directly debilitating about Wolin’s spatial image of the intellectual world. He views intellectual exchange as fundamentally bounded by national borders, walled off into separate French and American worlds. This leads him to homogenize French and American intellectual spheres. While he equates America with liberal pluralism, he equates France with an unstable radical-authoritarianism. He can’t recognize the immense internal differentiation of the French intellectual field, the profound differences between Derrida’s and Foucault’s institutional careers, the separation of French philosophy into small avant-gardes, numerous sub-specialties, and many different institutional milieux. (Foucault, far from being forgotten in France, is now taught, contra Wolin, in French lycées.) And even as Wolin denounces the category of “post-structuralism” as an American invention, he employs it unwittingly himself, describing a homogeneous American response to poststructuralism unsettled only by a few “committed disciples.”

François Cusset, on the other hand, in “French Theory’s American Adventures,” takes a much more subtle view of theory’s spatial and historical situation. He asks about theory’s future, about the convergence of theory and activism, about the intellectual transformations that theory met as it crossed from France to America. He does see an inversion between the political fate of theory in France and in the U.S., but less ahistorically than does Wolin:

“What we are facing here is a symmetrically reversed situation: on the one hand, a society run by a new wave of conservatives, but whose intellectual field, limited to isolated campuses, enjoys a proliferation of radical discourses, minority theories, and bold textual innovations, with little effect on the rest of America’s public space; on the other hand, a country run by a new wave of liberals (François Mitterrand’s “socialists”), but whose broad intellectual field, occupying a central role in the public space, has just been taken over by a herd of young center-left humanists, with the result of sweeping away leftist and radical tendencies and replacing them with a universalist moral blackmail still on the front stage in today’s France.”

That is, while a conservative American government faces a segregated but lively subculture of campus leftism, a liberal French government is accompanied more harmoniously by a widespread culture of “center-left humanism” that actively suppresses more radical leftist discourse. Hence, in contrast to Wolin, for Cusset it’s America that’s more politically bipolar and France that’s more oppressively and homogeneously liberal. And Cusset foresees new possibilities for the spatiotemporal flow of poststructuralist theory:

“French society is now at a time when all those American intellectual currents, forbidden for import over the last three decades, can finally be put to use in making sense of an unprecedented situation. Indeed, universities and independent publishers are working hard these days to make cultural studies, minority theories, “pop” philosophy, gender analyses, and the postcolonial paradigm not only better known in France (the only major country where prominent theorists behind such currents had not yet been translated), but also critically reformulated to better address specifically French issues… [French theory authors,] their texts, and the endless interpretations they inspire (together forming one cultural continuum) can still help us fashion a future of struggles and world making — within but also beyond higher education, in the United States but also throughout the rest of the world.”

In other words, while Jeff Williams laments that theory is being reprinted and memorialized in the U.S., Cusset informs us that American cultural and theoretical critiques are now being imported into France with renewed intellectual vigor. (For example, Judith Butler’s 1990 classic, Gender Trouble, was recently published in France, in 2005.) Wolin, for his part, rejects “poststructuralism” as irredeemable irrationality even as he rather cheerfully characterizes it as one more competing product in the intellectual market, as if he’s uncertain whether to give it a philosophical thrashing or to compliment it on its market share. Cusset, on the other hand, says that we need to get beyond blithe reenactment or crude rejection of theory, taking a more critical historicist approach:

“If theory is to be of any use nowadays, the many tricks and games implied by its cultural metamorphoses should be taken seriously: by addressing the American identity of French theory, and even by pondering the strange feedback effect of a recent return of French theory to France.”

In other words, if we are to critically reappropriate theory, if we are to make use of it in the present or future, we must first analyze its history, examine its flows through time and space, and more generally, put spatiality and temporality at the center of our theoretical consciousness. Such an analysis, for Cusset, is necessary for making theory again relevant to social struggle and transformation. One might say that Cusset is advocating a dialectical and historical – maybe even Marxist – approach to theory as a historical phenomenon and an intellectual avenue for political change.

The prevalence of rhetorics of time and space in academic texts has intrigued me for some time (“here I’ll demonstrate that x…”; “we must begin anew”; “we must go back to Freud”; “we have transcended Freud”; I hear frequent talk of intellectual “moves” on an intellectual “terrain” of “positions”). These peculiar spatiotemporal strategies and rhetorics, curious in themselves, are also perhaps revealing of the fantasy structure of academic labor, in which immaterial, abstract intellectual activity is humanized and rationalized by way of familiar schemas of place and time. I suppose it goes without saying that such strategies often serve as conduits for academic power and debate and struggle: to call something passé, say, is most certainly to denigrate it. And it may be that academic construals of time and space have some more buried ideological function, deserving of further scrutiny.

But on a less abstract level, I wonder whether a critical reappropriation of 60s radical philosophy is really the best intellectual task we could set for ourselves. I often suspect that today we lack the sense of intellectual excitement that was present once, elsewhere. Perhaps it would be better to form new theories and intellectual collectivities, rejecting aspirations for thorough mastery of the intellectual past. We needn’t consign ourselves to the endless rereadings of Marx and Adorno that define a group like Chicago’s Platypus. Should we take the path advocated by Hiro Miyazaki, in which we generate intellectual hope for ourselves by re-enacting the hope of others on a new terrain? Or is the intellectual future something that we discover by undoing the world around us rather than trying to imitate it?