Between Thing and Theory

And they should have begun with metaphysics, which seeks its proofs not in the external world but within the modifications of the mind of him who meditates it.

Giambattista Vico

"Between Thing and Theory" takes up perennial problems of critical thought and interpretation, particularly as they pertain to the relation between history and aesthetic judgment. The inconclusiveness of aesthetic judgment is perhaps its primary attraction, challenge, and vexation. Aesthetic works are the products of deliberate human imaginative effort and thus reflect the traces of other consciousnesses in some way. Beholders of such works often seem compelled to respond, "as if," in Derek Attridge's (1999: 25) words, the work under consideration "demanded a new work in response." The difficulty has been in locating the grounds of interpretation—the nature of the demand. Is such a ground to be found in the originating consciousness, the work itself, the interpreter, or the historical context within which the work was produced and is apprehended? One goal of critical thought over the long history of Western culture has been to answer this question, to postulate firm grounds and criteria from which protocols of interpretation could be established. Idealism, mimeticism, expressivism, and other systematic approaches to this problem have been proposed as solutions and continue to inform critical practice still. Nevertheless, none has carried the day, and the variability of aesthetic experience remains. As Hazard Adams (1971: 5) concedes in his influential anthology Critical Theory since Plato, "a case can be made that the history of critical theory is one of cyclical error."

At the same time, these interpretive and methodological dilemmas have a special character in our contemporary setting. In scholarly fields as diverse as our own specializations—early modern culture and film studies—a widespread trend has emerged consisting in the privileging of the historical record as corrective to the vagaries of interpretation and the allegedly unproductive reflexivity that is often associated with the influence of French intellectual thought—especially that of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault but also of Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Giles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari—on the literary and cultural theory of the 1970s and 1980s. ¹ As a field whose formation in many ways coincided with the rise of such theory in the humanities, film studies' turn from theory is instructive in this regard. In a report on the annual meeting of the Society for Cinema Studies in 2000, Sean Griffin (2001: 1–2) noted the contrast between the 1999 plenary session and that of 2000. While in 1999, speakers

cast an almost nostalgic picture of the "high moment" in film theory (ca. the late 1960s and 1970s), and practically bemoaned the "end of theory" in cinema studies . . . the 2000 plenary seemed almost a rebuttal of the glum warnings. . . . All of the speakers grounded their comments in a welcome pragmatic approach to what opportunities there are currently in the academy. . . . The concreteness of the topics grounded the plenary in materialist concerns.

While the attractiveness of pragmatic scholarly projects (i.e., solvable research questions) seems undeniable, the question of whether or not there was reason to lament the demise of "theory" remains. The turn toward history—toward the material, or the thing—does not so much settle the problems that concerned theory as attempt to evade them.

We see this clearly in the emergence and aftermath of New Historicism in American cultural theory. The succession of New Historicism by even more strictly materialist approaches raises a concern that the gains of the previous historical turn may have resulted in an idealization of its object, the thing. Paradoxically, this results in reanimating the methodological concerns that were seemingly laid to rest with the declaration that "the era of big theory is over"—as the New York Times's Emily Eakin announced in an article entitled "The Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn't Matter" (2003). ² As...