From the WSJ Opinion Archives
BOOKSHELF
Truth Has Nothing to Do With It
Is Theory going out of fashion in American universities?
A half-century ago theorists in departments of literature debated such topics as the relation of scientific truth to the sort of truth made available by great literature. Now that topic is no longer raised, not because answers have been found but because the reigning consensus holds that "truth" is an empty concept, that there is no such thing as "literature," let alone "great literature," and that the meaning of any piece of writing--or "text"--is unstable at best.
Of course today's academic theorists do not limit themselves to deconstructing, say, Jane Austen. They practice a broader sort of "theory" or, better, Theory. (One needs a capital letter to do justice to the ambition of the project.) Under the rubric of "cultural studies," theorists claim to possess the key to understanding all sorts of human activity, from crime to colonialism. The Frenchmen who started it all, figures like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, are now in disfavor in their native country and, worse, out of fashion. But they still have a grip on American humanistic scholarship.
But for how much longer? A sign that things may be changing is "Theory's Empire," edited by Daphne Patai and Will Corral. Its 47 contributors patiently dissect all aspects of Theory, from its putative grounding in the ideas of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) to the practical effects--say, in India--of the postcolonial ("poco") branch of Theory, which does so much to denigrate logic and reason.
Valentine Cunningham, Raymond Tallis and other contributors show how much theorists distort Saussure's insights. Contrary to what the theorists claim, the arbitrary aspects of language as a system (langue) in no way imply that individual speech acts (parole) must be likewise arbitrary and thus incapable of communicating truths. "The confusion between the system and its use," notes Mr. Tallis--e.g., between the arbitrary rules of syntax and the particular meaning of a sentence--is "especially unforgivable in writers who claim to be familiar with Saussure, as it was one of the latter's great achievements to distinguish these things."
Theory has tried to deconstruct science in a similarly misleading way. The philosopher Thomas Nagel observes that theorists invoke quantum theory and relativity "to show that today even science has had to abandon the idea of an objective, mind-independent reality." But, he curtly remarks, "neither theory has this significance." Another philosopher, Susan Haack, draws attention to Theory's use of what she calls "the Passes-for Fallacy": What "passes for truth" is equated with "what is truth." Such an elision, she notes, allows theorists to make a bogus claim: They observe (rightly) that some things once thought to be true are now considered false; then they discard (wrongly) the very concept of truth.
If challenged, theorists often vilify their opponents as right-wingers or worse. Kwame Anthony Appiah observes that when Susan Gubar, a leading academic feminist, raised questions about the state of feminist theory she "found herself condemned, astonishingly, as a troglodyte, perhaps even a racist." Ironically, Theory may harm the very politics it purports to defend. Noam Chomsky finds it "remarkable" that leftist intellectuals, with their attacks on rationality, "should seek to deprive oppressed people not only of the joys of understanding and insight, but also of tools of Enlightenment." Meera Nanda laments that when postcolonialists repudiate the "objectivity" and "universalism" of science, they give "aid and comfort to Hindu chauvinists who display many symptoms of fascism."
For most people outside the academy what is most striking--and most puzzling--about Theory is the prose in which it is couched. To take an example offered by contributor D.G. Myers: Homi Bhaba, a major theorist, refers to "the desperate effort to 'normalize' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality." (Whatever that may mean.) The theorist Luce Irigaray asks more clearly, though not more cogently: "Is E=MC² a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possibly sexed nature of the equation is not directly its use by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest."
It all makes one wonder how anyone could ever have taken such pronouncements seriously. "Theory's Empire," by its very existence, suggests that even professors need not feel obliged to do so any longer. And where will their newfound wisdom end? Mr. Appiah reports that "more and more literary critics" have actually decided to "devote themselves to . . . literature."
Mr. Seaton is a professor of English at Michigan State University. You can buy "Theory's Empire" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
