Toward Transcultural Theory

"Theory" is a label that first gained significance in the context of American (and multinational) universities in the late 1960s onward, in reference to the groundbreaking work led by European (and mainly French) scholars, whose writings (both literarily and philosophically inflected) were cutting across the disciplines and vigorously reassessing epistemic prejudices and consensus, in a way that also seemed to respond to the demands of the times—and to the political crisis in the West. In the 1960s and 1970s especially, a whole generation of European intellectuals found very little assent in the social institution of their countries of origin—whereas American Academia seemed to offer an external scene of legitimization for such authors. The relative openness of US institutions to those new ideas is based on many factors: the reopening of a "European tropism" owing to the US participation in World War II; the surreptitious increase of the "Americanization" of Western Europe through military occupation, the Marshall plan, and cultural commodification, making the more or less temporary exile of intellectuals in America an easier endeavor than before; the success of the previous influx of European scholars and scientists during the 1930s and 1940s.

Here, it should be noted that the phrase "critical theory" gained currency in the United States before the 1960s, thanks to the exile of several prominent figures of the Frankfurt School. "Critical theory" (as developed by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and their colleagues) presented itself as both a method and a discourse transcending the compartmentalization of knowledge, linking a critique of the contemporary with longstanding scholarly traditions and the conceptual methods of philosophy in particular, finally offering a political value for the present—often in a (post-)Marxist, or "radical" perspective. Those features undoubtedly influenced the reception of (post)structuralism in the United States and partially explain why the name "theory" gradually became a convenient appellation for very diverse approaches, despite (ironically) a wide rejection of this very term by most of the "big names" of so-called "French theory." The sense of "theory" in the absolute (with its more relative undertones, linking it to literary studies and to a philosophical ascent) is perceptible in the creation in 1976 of the "School of Criticism and Theory" (now hosted at Cornell University) or the 1982 article by Paul de Man, "The Resistance to Theory."

Theory, then, as a collective noun referring to quite different and often incompatible thoughts, is, at its core, a multi-national category. It first has been co-elaborated by and through the circulation of ideas, persons, and texts between two main poles: Europe and the United States. In its factual definition and its currently vague but heuristic sense, theory depends on migrations and displacements. Without them, one would mainly speak along the more traditional lines of disciplinary and discursive divisions (referring to "philosophers," "essayists," "critics," etc.). Now, in its first wave, theory was transnational but neither global nor detached from very local particularities (mainly the more open-ended structures of American Academia and the polymathic training of French élites). Thanks to the imperial role of the United States, the further dissemination of theory paved the way for a more globalized moment. It is no accident that postcolonial theory emerged from scholars who had been involved or educated in the first moment of transmission. At the same time theory was somehow receding in American universities (for reasons both internal and external to the "marketplace of ideas"), its globalized becoming was even more obvious through the unexpected means of the postcolonial. As was the case before, this new (and now more than multinational) circulation was of course deeply altering the contents and goals of the previous projects. One could say that, by the end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s: (1) The name of theory became a truly "global label," while still bearing a kind of American imprint; and (2) The practice of theory was no longer perceived as being exclusive to a meta-European frame. From that point on, the so far untranslated part of Anglo-American "theory" became more readily available in other languages, allowing for some new feedback effects (like the...