As a result, theory
is intimidating. One of the most dismaying features of theory today is that it
is endless. It is not something that you could ever master, not a particular
group of texts you could learn so as to 'know theory'. It is an unbounded corpus
of writings which is always being augmented as the young and the restless, in
critiques of the guiding conceptions of their elders, promote the contributions
to theory of new thinkers and rediscover the work of older, neglected ones.
Theory is thus a source of intimidation, a resource for constant upstagings: “What? you haven't
read Lacan! How can you talk about the lyric without
addressing the specular constitution of the speaking
subject?” Or “how can you write about the Victorian novel without using Foucault's
account of the deployment of sexuality and the hysterization
of women's bodies and Gayatri Spivak's
demonstration of the role of colonialism in the construction of the
metropolitan subject?” At times, theory presents itself as a diabolical sentence
condemning you to hard reading in unfamiliar fields, where even the completion
of one task will bring not respite but further difficult assignments. (“Spivak? Yes, but have you read
Benita Parry's critique of Spivak and her response?”)
The unmasterability of theory is a major cause of resistance to
it. No matter how well versed you may think yourself, you can never be sure
whether you 'have to read' jean Baudrillard, Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Helene Cixous,
C. l. R. james, Melanie Klein, or Julia Kristeva, or whether you can 'safely' forget them. (It
will, of course, depend on who 'you' are and who you want to be.) A good deal
of the hostility to theory no doubt comes from the fact that to admit the
importance of theory is to make an open-ended commitment, to leave yourself in
a position where there are always important things you don't know. But this is
the condition of life itself.
Theory makes you
desire mastery: you hope that theoretical reading will give you the concepts to
organize and understand the phenomena that concern you. But theory makes
mastery impossible, not only because there is always more to know, but, more
specifically and more painfully, because theory is itself the questioning of
presumed results and the assumptions on which they are based. The nature of
theory is to undo, through a contesting of premisses
and postulates, what you thought you knew, so the effects of theory are not
predictable. You have not become master, but neither are you where you were
before. You reflect on your reading in new ways. You have different questions
to ask and a better sense of the implications of the questions you put to works
you read.
Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
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Few people are likely
to bet that the institutional structure of academic literary study will change,
but this is because in a world of educational expansion, it was always easier,
when challenges arose, to change the paradigm instead. In a world of contraction,
though, it may be simpler and more sensible to alter the structure. Literary
studies has existed since the 1960s in a heavily professionalized system in
which the positions are subsidized, the research is subsidized, the journals
and presses that publish the research are subsidized, the libraries that buy
the journals and monographs are subsidized, and the audience is increasingly
limited to peer specialists. There is no "reality check" on this work
because the only reality is the rapidly shrinking profession itself, buoyed up
by dollars that will now be disappearing. Almost no one outside the profession
cares even to understand what goes on inside it; they will, given a choice,
certainly not care to pay for it. The best course for humanities departments to
take may be to curtail the system of credentialism
and specialization, to end the grip of the professionalist
mentality, and to open their doors to the art and ideas, and the people who
create them, that have always existed beyond their narrow walls.
Louis Menand, “The Demise of Disciplinary Authority”
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Yet it is the market
itself which produces the effect of cultural capital flight. The
professional-managerial class has made the correct assessment that, so far as
its 'future profit is concerned, the reading of great works is not worth the
investment of very much time or money. The perceived devaluation of the
humanities curriculum is in reality a decline in its market value. If the
liberal arts curriculum still survives as the preferred course of study in some
elite institutions, this fact has everything to do with the class constituency
of these institutions. With few exceptions, it is only those students who
belong to the financially secure upper classes who do not feel compelled to
acquire professional or technical knowledge as undergraduates. The professional-managerial
class, on the other hand, many of whose members have only recently attained to
middle and upper middle-class status, depends entirely
on the acquisition of technical knowledge in order to maintain its status, or
to become upwardly mobile.
John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary
Canon-Formation (CT 1478a)