Floods, Droughts, and the Future of Theory

Can Derrida end droughts? Foucault stop flooding? Theory prevent tsunamis? Over the past several decades, theory’s scope has expanded to provide readings of everything from Baudelaire to Barbie dolls, but what can it do with tsunamis, droughts, and floods? Can the work of cultural and critical theorists provide insight into the ecological disasters of the present—in particular, those that appear to be linked to human actions?

There has been an innovative initiative of late to use anthropogenic climate change to test the capacities of established critical modes such as deconstruction, cultural studies, post-structuralism, and Marxism. Scholars such as SUNY Albany English professor Tom Cohen are examining the degree to which the work of thinkers like Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault can address human-caused environmental disasters.

“The eco-catastrophic logics disclosed in the past decade,” comments Cohen, “were not addressed by the master thinkers of the [twentieth] century, whose idioms form different guilds and extensions today.” For Cohen and others, at issue is whether existing theory can “account” for anthropogenic climate change or whether climate change demands a new kind of “theory.”

The locus of the critical climate change initiative is the Institute of Critical Climate Change (IC3). In a series of colloquia and workshops beginning in 2005, the IC3 has embarked on discussions that have the potential to change the way engaged intellectuals regard climate change.

The work of the members of this initiative, especially Tom Cohen and Yale University’s Henry Sussman, who have edited two landmark collections of essays on critical climate change, has the potential to produce significant insight on the climate disasters that color our present historical moment. Their work also has the capacity to raise the bar on what we expect from “theory” in the humanities, and to produce revisions in the disciplinary organization of the academy—and the time is right for both.

Critical theory in the humanities is definitely not what it used to be. Gone is the aestheticism, stylistic analysis, ahistoricism, and search for patterns and archetypes that typified the field in the 1970s. Today, theory is used to examine and account for an array of things ranging from the rise of the corporate university and nature of the culture wars to free market economics and the attenuation of the welfare state. It concerns itself with issues of multiculturalism, globalization, and postmodernism, both as concepts in themselves and as applied to an understanding of literature and culture at large.

Around the turn of the last century, emerging fields offered new possibilities for theoretical interventions and brought an increasing level of complexity to and interest in theory. Now, says Vincent Leitch in his manifesto, Living with Theory (2008), we find theory applied to a long list of subfields: “body studies, disability studies, whiteness studies, media studies, indigenous studies, narrative studies, porn studies, performance studies, working-class studies, popular culture studies, trauma studies, and so on.” Some would argue that the application of traditional theoretical models to climate change is a late attempt to absorb yet another subject into an outdated mode of inquiry. One might question whether this explosion of theory from a relatively homogeneous, organized, and definable field to a highly heterogeneous, disorganized, and indefinable one represents theory’s end—or a new beginning. “If theory means poststructuralism(s) or all contemporary movements and schools or postmodern discourse,” comments Leitch, “then we can project a historical passing, an end.”

However, for Leitch, this definition of theory is one choice among a number of possible conceptions, most of which clearly reveal the field to be alive and well. For example, if by “theory” one means “the gamut of contemporary schools and movements, plus their offshoots in cultural studies” or “a toolbox of flexible, useful, and contingent devices and concepts, judged for their productivity and innovation,” then theory is alive and flourishing.

For Sussman and collaborator Jason Groves, there is strong sense that the work of the IC3 is a continuation or extension of the project of critical theory. “Critique, as the theoretically driven responsible and rigorous decoding and reprogramming of messages, motives, trends, performances, and systematic aberrations,” comment...