Theory as a Body of Work

Can one speak of "the book history of theory"? The term sounds like a paradox, given that theory and history are operating on different axes and each with a different axe to grind. But the "theory book moment" is something we can talk about, the eruption of post-sixties intellectual troublemaking that would revolutionize the study of literature and culture. Maybe the book history of theory, like Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), with its angels and lost letters, is a set of reflections on time and loss. What they did, what they didn't do, what theories held up, which ones seem quaint, which ones are as hard to understand today as they were forty years back. Some works of theory helped open doors, some became lost illusions.

It was my good luck to have had a part in helping scholars show us doors and maybe offer a few illusions. A lifetime ago, in the late seventies and into the mid-1980s, I worked at Columbia University Press (starting there the same month as two other green slips, Doug Armato, now director at the University of Minnesota Press, and Jennifer Crewe, now director at Columbia) before I moved on to spend the next twenty years at a publishing house known, variously, as Methuen, Inc., then Routledge Chapman and Hall, then Routledge, or maybe Routledge-an-imprint-of-Taylor-and-Francis, all of which was the same company with different owners, different surely baffled chief executives sitting in London or Toronto or somewhere in Connecticut very much concerned about bottom line and return on investment, and not at all about Derrida or Butler or queer theory or postcolonial critique, much less the way feminism or race, or much of anything political or social or cultural, might matter or possibly change the world.²

And in retrospect, who could blame them? These were hard things to think about and work through, even for those of us grappling with these problems as scholars or editors and publishers. (The most I can say about many of the people who ran the publishing houses I worked for is that they didn't get in the way, or at least not too much, at least not for a pretty dazzly decade or so, though the course of true theory book publishing would have run a lot smoother if the labor of explaining why we were publishing this work or that hadn't taken up quite so much time. I say this for the benefit of anyone who imagines that working outside of the university press world is somehow cushier and easier. Book publishing removed all the cushions a while back now.)

Editors can choose books of interest to theory readers, and occasionally make them happen, either by commissioning them or by collecting materials and persuading the author to let them appear between covers. These days I spend my time teaching and writing, but during my years as an editor, I saw and read a lot of pretty abstract theoretical work, and even more applications of theoretical work. Some of it I understood, but that's not the way theory publishing works: you die as a scholarly editor if the limits of your own direct knowledge safeguard the borders of your publishing program. You're a suitor but not a judge. OK, you are a judge, and a suitor, and if you're going to publish in theory it helps if you're interested in the big-picture, fundamental-pattern approach to materials, texts, and social conditions. An editor has to be just smart enough, just curious enough, and just ignorant enough to be surprised, intrigued, and—in the best manuscripts—shocked.

Theory, like horror, is a genre meant to shock. And there were plenty of theory books that caused global shocks. Some still do. In theory's big moment, people bought essential texts—A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Orientalism (1978), Gender Trouble (1990)—but it wasn't a short-shelf phenomenon. The energy of the theory moment came from people buying not a few famous books but a lot of...