On Being the Right Age for Theory: Notes of a Fellow Traveler

HERBERT N. SCHNEIDAU On Being the Right Age for Theory: Notes of a Fellow Traveler THE PREMATURE AND DISHEARTENING DEATHS of Paul de Man, Eugenio Donato, and Joseph N. Riddel might be said to mark a crisis or watershed in what has become known as "theory," were it not that theory itself teaches us to be suspicious of such periodized, patriarchalized histories of movements. Even with such suspicions, one can easily imagine some chronicler in the middle-distant future using these deaths as symbolic of a major shift in theory's fortunes. Unfortunately the evidence is beginning to mount that the shift was occurring anyway. Among the many reasons I have to wish Joe Riddel were still alive is to hear what he'd have to say about these recent evolutions. On the one hand, theory has obviously succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of those of us who began picking up the news about all this in the mid-sixties. I can still remember Joe's excitement about the Johns Hopkins conference in 1966, made so memorable by the volume edited by Donato and Richard Macksey. We all knew—even those of us who were never interested in the practice of theory (only the theory of it)—that this was a shaking of the foundations, but I don't think even Joe could have foreseen theory becoming an academic orthodoxy. In those days and for long afterward it was assuredly "oppositional discourse," enjoying the vigor of a playful rogue hormone running through the system. But eventually it lost that status. In some of the darkest boondocks, one can still find citadels of "resistance to theory," old men grumbling about the death of literary studies; and then of course there are John Searle and other holdouts, sneering,that deconstruction has given bullshit a bad name. However, in these maledictions one hears the tone Arizona Quarterly Volume 50 Number 1, Spring 1994 Copyright O 1994 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 Herbert N. Schneidau of the old Roman order against Christianity, a note of resignation to doom. But at the very moment of triumph, theory has been metamorphosing like some virulent alien life-form into unfamiliar new shapes (at least if we define it as broadly as many do nowadays), and perhaps it's good that Joe was spared having to deal with this. What a typical graduate student now means by "theory" has psychopolitical overtones that can be grating. What's disconcerting is not only the new forms themselves , with their frequently reductive political vocabulary, but even more the dizzying succession of them, and the fact that this speeded-up evolution seems to have become an end in itself, so that the need for continuing revolution dominates (as in the last futile stages ofMaoism). Among other things, this means that former gurus and their doctrines have to be recurrently repudiated: so this essay is about why there will be no "grand old men" of theory (sorry, Hillis). Forget Foucault, and Baudrillard too. A behaviorist observing today's scene might say that theory mainly functions now to divide the generations, like many new technologies. Youngsters these days can do effortlessly with computers and vcrs what it takes us oldsters painful hours to accomplish—if at all. Sample true anecdote: a friend bought a new vcr, found the directions for programming new channels impenetrable, called the man at the store, who said: "You got a teenager in the house? Let him do it. " Theory is becoming , in effect, a similar way to shut out the aging. To quote an offhand remark by Stanley Fish, nowadays one has to retool every five years. Obviously, this is easier for the young than the old; in fact, it puts a premium on inexperience (second best is loss of memory). Accelerated mutations have led theory to a point where no sanctioned authorities control anything about it, and the very idea of an expertise that would serve as qualification for such authorities is inconceivable. Generations have always concocted such devices, or at least they have in America, where one wants to have one's own argot, entertainments , and so on, that older people will not understand...