ANTITUSSIVE

By EMILY EAKIN NYT WinR Sun October 17, 2004

WITH the death on Oct. 8 of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the era of big theory came quietly to a close.

He had been among the last of a generation of thinkers, mostly male and invariably French, whose sweeping claims about the nature of language, existence and reality transfixed scholars on both sides of the Atlantic and, for several decades, beginning in the 1960's, turned humanities departments into hotbeds of productivity and debate.

Mr. Derrida outlived fellow theorists Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, but signs of theory's waning influence had been accumulating around him for years. Since the early 1990's, the grand intellectual paradigms with which these men were prominently associated - Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism - had steadily lost adherents and prestige.

The world had changed but not necessarily in the ways some of big theory's fervent champions had hoped. Ideas once greeted as potential catalysts for revolution began to seem banal, irrelevant or simply inadequate to the task of achieving social change.

Deconstruction, Mr. Derrida's primary legacy, was no exception. Originally a method of rigorous textual analysis intended to show that no piece of writing is exactly what it seems, but rather laden with ambiguities and contradictions, deconstruction found ready acolytes across the humanities and beyond - including many determined to deconstruct not just text but the political system and society at large.

Today, the term has become a more or less meaningless artifact of popular culture, more likely to turn up in a description of an untailored suit in the pages of Vogue than in a graduate seminar on James Joyce.

But even as theory, or at least its distinctive vocabulary, was seeping into everyday life, some scholars were renouncing it, as Frank Lentricchia, an English professor at Duke University, did in a 1996 essay in Lingua Franca magazine. Theory, he argued, had all but supplanted literature in English departments, reducing the literary canon to a litany of political and social wrongs, "a cesspool," as he put it, "of racism, poverty, sexism, homophobia and imperialism." Other scholars quietly abandoned big theory - writing at its most general and abstract - for more personal projects, producing memoirs and even novels.

A 2003 symposium on the future of theory hosted by the editors of Critical Inquiry, an academic journal, captured the bleak mood. When a student in the audience asked the panelists, more than two dozen distinguished scholars, what theory was good for, the answer came back amid much hand-wringing over the Bush administration and the war in Iraq: very little.

That same year, the British professor Terry Eagleton, who made his name as a Marxist literary critic, published "After Theory," in which he declared: "We are living now in the aftermath of what one might call high theory, in an age which, having grown rich on the insights of thinkers like Althusser, Barthes and Derrida, has also in some ways moved beyond them."

Why did big theories flourish, and why are they now in retreat? The most likely explanation involves politics. In this view, the rise and fall of theory paralleled the changing fortunes of the left. "The fate of major theories was very much bound up with a political moment," Mr. Eagleton said in a telephone interview. "The heroic period for that theory was the 1960's to the 1980's, a period in which the left was on the up." More than simply tools for analyzing literary or philosophical texts, theory was seen as a political weapon with which to challenge the status quo. As the English professor Stanley Fish put it in a telephone interview: "There was a general desire for there to be a political payoff for theoretical formulations. The hope was to revolutionize the world."

In the case of deconstruction, the idea that hidden power hierarchies and agendas could be exposed through careful close readings had tremendous political appeal. Analyzing Mr. Derrida's rise to stardom in a 1987 article, "How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida," Michèle Lamont, a sociologist at Harvard, argued that among other things he "provided just the theoretical position that met and matched the political climate."

Then the political climate changed, and big theory's fate was sealed. The Berlin Wall came down, and the Soviet Union collapsed. Advances in neuroscience upended Freudian assumptions about the brain, and psychoactive drugs replaced psychoanalysis. And for the most part the social revolutions that big theory had seemed to portend did not take place.

Today, humanities departments are quieter places than they were when Mr. Derrida's ideas first caught on. The insights - especially the powerful idea that language is not a transparent medium for representing reality but rather a cultural system that shapes our values and beliefs - are here to stay. But these days, few scholars are producing discipline-transcending, paradigm-breaking new work.

The emphasis has shifted to what Ms. Lamont in a telephone interview called "finely grained, empirical research." She added, "There are not many huge theorists to be hired out there."

But that may not be such a bad thing after all. In retrospect, Mr. Fish said, it was a mistake to believe that theory could change the world.

"Once theoretical questions cease to be questions in the realm of philosophy and become questions about how to live our lives, that places a great burden on theory," he said. "No theory can make good on that promise. It's the difference between the claims one can legitimately make and the claims that one probably should not make for theory. On the one hand you can say, as a theorist, 'Follow me, and I will show you an answer to an important, vexing and longstanding question.' Or you can say, 'Follow me, and I will lead you to the promised land.'

''The first is, of course, the appropriate claim and necessary claim made by scholars and theorists. The second is the language of prophets or even of gods. And theorists, thankfully, are neither prophets nor gods."

# posted by Resty Odon @ 11:20 AM