On Sidestepping the Political. A review of Jason Potts and Daniel Stout, eds., Theory Aside

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...