Who Sells Out Theory?

On December 16, 1967, the British rock-and-roll band the Who released one of the strangest albums every recorded. The same year, the French intellectual Jacques Derrida published a trio of philosophy books that were as equally strange in their own way.

The album was "a critique of the forces of commerce that had created and sustained the whole pop industry of the 1950s and 1960s" (Atkins 2000, 97), while the books were likewise a critique albeit of the forces of metaphysics that had created and sustained the whole philosophy industry since Greek antiquity.

The Who entitled their album The Who Sell Out, whereas Derrida avoided the similar but fitting title, Derrida Sells Out Western Philosophy, Volumes 1-3, and went with the more academic titles of Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology.

In one way, rock music and Western philosophy were never the same after the Who and Derrida "sold out" their respective enterprises. The Who's album played forward in time became part of a rising chorus of voices warning about the limits of capitalism and consumer society and foreshadowed the forces that led to the breakdown of the music and recording industries in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Likewise, Derrida's early "deconstruction" of metaphysics played a key role in the rise of the linguistic turn in theory that is now in its second generation—and has yielded many theoretical alternatives to structuralism and post-structuralism such as cultural studies, globalization studies, feminism, race and gender studies, queer theory, postcolonialism, Marxism, and new historicism in the late twentieth-century as well as a very long list of "studies" such as debt studies, sound studies, surveillance studies, and so on, along with new materialism, object-oriented-ontology, and surface reading in the early twenty-first century.

In this essay, I'd like to argue that there are two fundamentally different ways to "sell out" theory (and music). The first resembles more the work of the Who and Derrida wherein the masterly deployment of critique yields a new type of relationship to their respective "industries." It is a relationship that not only demystifies and undermines the extant conditions of the industry but also which offers it a different direction. This type of "sell out" establishes the bar for new directions in music and theory. It is a form of musical and theoretical "sell out" that is innovative, progressive, and sometimes even strange.

The other way to "sell out" theory (and music) is to treat it primarily or solely as a means to personal, professional, or financial gain. It involves "using" theory to advance one's career prospects or to gain notoriety or to sell books. The Mothers of Invention featuring Frank Zappa recorded an album from March through October 1967 whose title captures this type of selling out of theory well. It is called We're Only in It for the Money, and was released on March 4, 1968.¹ It was part of a larger project called No Commercial Potential.² After The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on May 26, 1967, Zappa changed the album title to parody the Fab Four because he felt that they were insincere and "only in it for the money."³ He targeted The Beatles as a symbol of the corporatization of youth culture, and regarded the album as a criticism of the band in particular, and psychedelic rock as a whole.⁴

In what follows, I'll discuss this other way of selling out theory through examples from the work of two contemporary theorists: Terry Eagleton and Rita Felski. The essay will conclude that it is difficult if not impossible to engage in theory today without implicating oneself in one or both of these "sell outs." Nevertheless, each way has radically different implications for the theory industry and its institutions.

We're Only in It for the Money

The Who's Sell Out provides a strange albeit powerful vision of "selling out." On the one hand, it mocks a music industry that monetizes everything; while...