The Social Structure of English in the Text of Theory

A number of explanations have been proposed for the turn from high theory to culture, social justice, and the everyday in Anglo-American English departments in the late 1980s. Some of these accounts focus on the exhaustion of text-centered paradigms of reading, others on the need for incisive responses to socio-political developments of the time. This paper argues that a shift in the governance philosophy of American higher education from public service to private investment drove curricular change and significantly altered the research culture in English studies. High theory marks the transition from the scientific ambitions of the field in an expanding higher education sector between 1950 and 1965 to its complex service and signaling function in the entrepreneurial university of the present. As the most institutionally embedded of high theory's foci, deconstruction provides a detailed symptomatic imaging of changes to the social structure of the discipline through its touchstones of textual ascription, decentering, and performativity. In each case, microscopic evidence testing, terminological abstraction, and the search for laws or properties of textual behavior (however uncanny or self-reflexive) create a scientific anti-science appropriate to a field undergoing an institutional devaluation of its knowledge work. In this view, deconstruction gave way to cultural studies, rather than to new and different forms of theory drawn from the social sciences, not because it was civically disengaged or had run out of interpretive steam but because the consolidation of the market-managerial university in the 1980s and 90s called for a different curricular alignment. This alignment, characterized by service teaching and the articulation of a social justice ("diversity") rationale, better fits the current institutional view of English studies as a field that does not make, study, or promise money, and whose future, therefore, lies not in better knowledge but in better organization.