THEORY IN A TIME OF WAR

After decades of passionate debate over people, culture, language, and society, the late twentieth century came down with an escalating case of theory fatigue. By the 1980's, the theories had gotten very advanced but lost most of their sex appeal. Those of us who actually like theory had it largely to ourselves.

That changed when the culture wars widened to make theory a target, or more accurately a political football, in a game of obscurantist brinksmanship. By playing on the aversion most academics just as much as self-proclaimed "ordinary people" have to unfamiliar ways of thinking, organized reactionaries managed to convince the latter to sneer at it as an academic indulgence at the very moment they were mobilizing theory-skeptical professors to challenge its academic acceptability.

All this happened during a period when the overwhelming trend among younger minds was towards an internet-inspired style of factual addition, rather than the complex noncommutative multiplication required by the theoretical constructs widely discussed at however varying a level of comprehension by earlier generations, from Freud to Jung, Sartre to Beauvoir, T.S. Eliot to Marshall McLuhan. The decline of interest among homespun prophets and campus lotharios has consigned theoretical pursuits to the professoriate, the trendier members of which now treat it as a junkyard nuisance. Whenever they catch a glimpse of a still-intact piece of theory, the cry goes out to pick up stones and converge from multiple disciplines, eliminating yet another unsightly reminder of the bygone era when people actually believed they could create complex, interdependent articulations, irreducible to the sum of their parts and built layer upon layer from deeply pondered foundations. In their place, we are treated to endless glorying jingles about the autonomous individual, liberal democracy, and the free market--and "exposes" of those, past and present, who refused to join in the choir.

Woe betide anyone intellectually serious enough to construct theories of their own. Many of the very dissenters who are always flinging gobs of theory at the wrecking crews are the first to join them in ridiculing would-be builders, proclaiming the end of the age of grand theories; one can only wonder why old grand theories are acceptable while new ones are not. It's striking how many devotees of European theory play fastidiously by academic rules which strictly prohibit the original formulation of anything similar as "big-picturism" with too much thinking and not enough footnotes. The result is a peculiarly derivative discourse in which native specifics are analyzed with an entirely imported set of generalities. I am reminded of Yeats' poem "The Scholars," where, after describing stuffy classicists slowly wearing away the carpet, he exclaims, "Oh Lord, what would they say/Did their Catullus walk that way?" What, indeed, would these American scholars say if the theorists they rely on had been as restricted as themselves?

But to concentrate my fire at such folks would risk being drawn into a gladiator's duel between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front. It is the anti-theory extremists who dominate the field. Even readers sympathetic to theory are likely to have absorbed their biases to some degree; to live in today's world is to be bombarded by them from all sides.

Sometimes their form is subtle; theoretical inquiry can be damned without even being named. Any time you hear that, in this day and age, the confusion and fragmentation of life are not merely apparent but real; how the big discovery is that there is no big discovery; how truly sophisticated explanations consist of pointing out complex interrelationships that have neither system nor starting point; or how specialization has rendered it impossible to be more than a good professional plowing a narrow field--you are being told, Don't try to theorize. These postmodern intellectual cop-outs are now spouted like age-old proverbs--a sign of anti-theory on the move.

And like any successful form of obfuscation, the anti-theoretic persuasion boosts its popularity with an irrelevant side-issue. It plays on the sympathies of the intimidated schoolchild (or former schoolchild) who, faced with repressive, demanding teachers and ideas she does not understand, rebels against the need to think, rejecting the possibility of deeper significance for material that, under an authoritarian pedagogical regimen, is presented so as to minimize any sense of connection with her life. This rebellion is particularly effective in the United States, where it has permeated popular culture for at least half a century and is hardly even a rebellion. Without it, anti-theory could arouse little sympathy; but that is not what it is.

Among the rabid conformists who actually run things, theory is valued for its legitimizing function, as a way to patch over social cleavages and give the ideologies that justify the existing order a unified and rational front. Theoretiphobia is therefore in its essence a frank acknowledgement of the hopelessness of the task--of the fact that these ideologies are now so mutually contradictory that even legitimist gourmands can only swallow them one piece at a time. But far from a reason to abandon what is sometimes called critical theory, the breakdown of ideology is precisely why theory needs to be critical. For theory ceases to be hopeless the moment it gives up the quest to reconcile the lies in which we all are inculcated--lies whose logical incoherence is now more open to the casual gaze than at any time in memory.

To take a simple example: if our society proclaims universal equality, yet is fundamentally structured upon massive inequalities of wealth and power--whose necessity, incidentally, it also proclaims--does this mean it's impossible to properly theorize the concept of equality? Or merely that any such theorization would have to reject this society's pretense of being egalitarian?

The aversion to theory, then, is the mating of two refusals--a refusal to reject socially sanctioned lies, and a refusal to try to make sense of them. Suckled by a military-corporate-backed scientism that brooks no fancy debate, they have together spawned an alternative that scrupulously avoids the interrogation of its own foundations that a theoretical approach would require. Indeed this anti-theoretic offspring is confined to strictly one-way inquiry, since it assumes all discourse that is not "objective" description of a passively absolute real world to be the mere expression of the speaker's subjectivity. Anyone who has studied at an American university--especially in social science, public policy, philosophy, or human neurology or genetics--is likely to be quite familiar with this approach, which I will term objectivism--the gallant spectacle of the social researcher on an elevated platform from which she reduces the people she studies to biological units and what they say and do to quantified behavior. Her own discourse, naturally, remains beyond the pale of inquiry.¹

Presented as the latest in rigor, the various objectivist practices thrive, like a mediocre magic act, on the ineptitude of audience scrutiny. Quantitative social "science" is able to reflect some of the prestigious glow of quantitative physical science because of a widespread failure to understand the profoundly different way the latter uses numbers; social "scientists," having scrupulously obtained and analyzed numerical results that are of little inherent interest, are forced to speculatively draw qualitative conclusions from them, whereas physical scientists insert observed quantities into equations, solve them, and thereby predict other observable quantities--something only attempted, not very successfully, by economists among the social scientific crew. Analytic philosophy can cultivate a role as a go-between of various disciplines only because few people realize how nineteenth century are its routine assumptions about physics, logic, consciousness, and language--even if newfangled notions like relativity, quantum mechanics, linguistic theory, and Goedelian logic are sometimes brought in, one at a time, as special guests. Publicity-savvy geneticists and neuropsychologists can grab headlines with correlations between biological and behavioral phenomena, taking cover behind their own "hard" scientific glamour and the conceptual disorientation "mind-brain" issues inspire, extracting far-reaching conclusions from poorly understood relationships while leaving the behavior no more clarified on its own terms than before. No matter--sleight of hand is all it takes to redefine an age-old problem so the painfully narrow conceptual scope of the new methodologies can "solve" it. Meanwhile, an endless sideshow of question-begging appeals to scientificity distract the crowd, assisted by that bluff-faced xenophobic clown, Anglo-Saxon common sense, with his pseudo-democratic resentment of any ideas too fancy or too different.²

Long dominated by objectivism of various stripes, American thought always left within its heterodox tent plenty of room for alternatives. Today, however, that space is aggressively in dispute. Multiple disciplines are collectively proclaiming a new synthesis of bio- and social science purposing to explain all manner of humanistic issues without bothering to include the humanities at all, let alone "theory." Indeed, alternative approaches to social inquiry are sternly made to understand that they had better recognize the supremacy of the new hegemon if they wish to retain the remnants of their respectability--witness the post-Cold-War retreat from area studies, the breakdown of consensus for funding the humanities, and the cloud under which textual critique itself has fallen.

At a time when the national security apparatus is trying to banish dissent from the land of the free, with spinmeisters echoing right-wing talking points to drown out real debate, objectivist partisans are waging a parallel and indeed coordinated campaign to delegitimize intellectual unorthodoxy, with a surprising level of complicity from Anglo-American intelligentsia at large.³ Having developed a set of talking points of their own, they repeat them endlessly for greater plausibility--biology is the key to human behavior, the mind is the brain, Marx and Freud are discredited, most of such-and-such complex social practice is hereditary, the non-quantitative version of such-and-such concept is superceded, metaphysics is divorced from the real empirical world, free markets and free trade produce prosperity, and similar inanities whose seeming self-evidence is a relatively recent development in every case--a symptom of just how effective, and aggressive, their propaganda campaign has been. Alternatives to these positions, commonplace in the seventies and even the eighties, now instantly evoke the derision dumped on anyone who hasn't heard something "well known."

The effect is to gate whole avenues outside the pale of acceptable inquiry--especially on the theoretical side of town. Those of us who know what's good for us had better realize that "There is no alternative" is meant to be understood intellectually as well as politically. The academic establishment's frequent and none-too-subtle reminders of those sacrosanct decrees called disciplinary consensuses--revokable only by those who issued them--together with a "soft" to "hard" scaling of disciplines that flourishes on the vaguest justifications, intermesh to instill firmly into aspiring young minds exactly which abdications of judgment ambition requires.

Even the ideal of cosmopolitanism cannot stand against the new imperatives--thus the emergence of a French exception to the academic taboo on overt ethnic slurs, just as there is an Arab exception in Hollywood. The impunity with which the word "Gallic" can be used as a pejorative to dismiss a person's work is quite remarkable considering the instant vehement condemnations that would result, for example, from substituting "Semitic." That this passes for witty intellectual banter is indeed telling, reflecting the passing of the influence of World War II era immigrants on American intelligentsia and a revived Anglosphere chauvinism that sees no need to hide its ugly colors. When those taking an interest in Continental theory are called to heel in the name of consensus, one can only wonder what gives this consensus its supposed authority if it stops at linguistic or national lines.⁴

The situation should be a wakeup call for those of us whose intellectual appetite does not include freedom fries. For like the imperial division of humankind into enemies and flunkies, there is no way to stop parochialism at domestic borders.

It may seem that I am representing the culture wars as if they were fought by only one side; but I do not think I am misreading the terrain of combat. While it cannot quite be said they are like those "Indian battles" which a less racist reexamination of American history later revealed to be massacres, the imbalance of resources, privileges, and power between the two sides couldn't be clearer--epitomized by the widely cited academic pecking order, with physical science on top and humanities at the bottom, a measure of usefulness to the power structure which some people now confuse with a hierarchy of intellectual worth.

When an author whose sole claim to fame is having pulled off a "jolly good prank" cowrites a book whose net contribution is to quote, out of context, passages he considers particularly ridiculous from already much-discussed works, with no attempt to ground them in their sources or modes of thought, and this book is widely referred to as a milestone in the debate, it becomes only too clear whose nonsense is actually in fashion.⁵ This logic of those with a powerful institutional sanction denouncing those with a weak one for being excessively "fashionable" is the same that enables the grotesque lie of the "liberal media," or that allows "political correctness" to refer to progressive authoritarianism when a reactionary one prevails in the vast majority of institutional settings. It is the logic of the bully who cannot stand that he doesn't quite run the whole school.

Rather than debating which methods are most fruitful, the currently approved procedure is to proclaim objectivist "rules" of research and argumentation to be universally accepted, while simultaneously denouncing any inquiry that demonstrates the contrary. Given the widespread assumption that objectivism has a monopoly on rigorous discourse about human affairs, it's puzzling to observe the poverty of its actual results. It is hard to fathom, for example, how anyone can read experimental psychology without noticing that the concepts are banal and poorly thought through and the field as a whole disconnected and lacking in depth. And you have to wonder how great social questions are supposed to be solved through analysis of the genetic and environmental factors influencing the likelihood of particular individual behaviors, since no combination of such factors could even describe, much less explain, the simplest social structure.⁶ It's just as strange to see the results of polls conflated with public opinion, given the obvious incommensurability between the interconnected thoughts that make up a person's opinions and a series of yes-and-no questions written by someone else.⁷ And people who would trade in their rich, complex understanding of another's speech, gestures, and expressions for unavoidably speculative interpretations of those other signals, likewise fascinating but far more enigmatic, detected inside the person's brain, are simply selling themselves short. If neurology is undeniably rigorous, it is a rigor that drops off rapidly once it tries to explain anything nonneurological. When it comes to human interactions, no experimentally-based discourse has remotely approached the contextualized, nuance-within-nuance rigor of a well-composed novel.

This no doubt accounts for the objectivist tendency to sneer politely at such humanist achievements. The naivete concerning the theory of aesthetics that regards good writing style as a decorative adornment--for good reason, when you see how most objectivists write--⁸ extends to an evolutionary condescension that treats the remarkably complex ratiocinations of bygone ages as so much primitive intuition. Perhaps this is the only way to avoid the disturbing implications of the fact that people who lacked any of the methodologies of objectivism had so much knowledge concerning the questions it claims to resolve--how Aristotle, Chuang Tzu, Saint Augustine, or for that matter Shakespeare, could have known so much about thought, for example, with next to no knowledge of the brain--and none at all of what happens when you subject a number of people to the same stimulus inside a laboratory and count up their responses.

But objectivism is an historically shallow world. Armed with their new incantation, "The mind is the brain," they now boldly venture into domains once thought too contaminated by subjectivity to be safe for folks of their cloth, hoping to vanquish Cartesian dualism and the centuries of attendant philosophical confusion. Their ignorance of the fact that Descartes' fundamental dualism was between thought and extension, not mind and brain, is more forgivable than the conceptual hypocrisy that lets them adopt his dualism as their own--now usually expressed in the form "subjectivity versus objectivity." The neutrality of their equation is misleading: no one says, "The brain is the mind." The aim is always to explain subjectivity objectively,⁹ thinking thereby to overcome the duality between the two--with all the logical precision of the argument that the age-old opposition between Christianity and Judaism could be eliminated if only every Jew would convert to Christianity. Of course, even if that happened, the distinction would remain embedded within Christianity. Similarly, even if every subjective phenomenon could be explained "objectively," the explanations would then hinge on the concept of objectivity, which in turn depends on the very Cartesian dualism supposedly being overcome.

The brain--an enlarged middle portion of the nervous system whose precise boundaries with the spinal cord have long been debated--has thus ceased to be a mere anatomical object and transmuted itself into a metaphysical necessity. Meanwhile, "the mind," forever plagued by an uncertain definition and hazy outer limits, is to inherit the existential and epistemological security that is the brain's birthright as an object of natural scientific study among those who use science as a substitute for religious certitude.¹⁰

The real aim is to save in its basic essence the concept of the soul, in a pseudo-secularized form called the mind, with neurology as the guarantor with which believers can henceforth repel all doubts. What confirms this beyond question is that most of the very people who so aggressively advocate the supposedly materialist reduction to neurology are adamant about preserving the possibility of "free will"--a concept whose religious origins cannot well be denied and which, insofar as it says anything at all relevant to science, quite blatantly contradicts its whole premise--that we live in a materially explicable world.¹¹

At the heart of objectivist metaphysics are two holies of holies: objective reality (the "objective" part never explained but implicitly a tendentious conflation between "not subjective" and "true"); and the autonomous mind, an enclosed, indivisible Cartesian idol any critique of which objectivists treat as blasphemy against the rationalist faith. Yet nothing logically or empirically guarantees that all mental phenomena associated with a single biological individual must be directed from a common center. As Kant pointed out over two centuries ago, it is only the word "I" that secures a unity we can neither prove nor disprove within ourselves. And indeed modern theory and literature call this unity gravely into question, suggesting that a human is a fragmented being, its consciousness prone to violent skips, its intentions little more than a mask, the very continuity of its life a retrospective illusion.

Conversely, not only our status and relations but even the thoughts of a hermit are inconceivable outside of a socially determined framework with respect to which we learn to parse our experience. All our concepts derive from our contacts with others and presume our insertion into a common world. The very language that guarantees an "I" locates and subordinates it within its own vastly complex structure. Any attempt to bypass this structure in an enclosed phenomenology only forces the subject to confront all the more starkly the discontinuities of her day-to-day existence.

It is these paired assaults, fragmentative and interconnective, on the idealized individual of nineteenth century ideology--not any supposed anti-materialist tendencies--that objectivism finds unacceptable in modern theory. But with a fleet of social scientists hoping to bring up the rear behind the Titanic voyage of genetic determinism, present-day objectivists have all the modesty of aspiration of the new American century. Under such circumstances, there is simply no place at the table for any suggestion that their quest might be aimed in a sterile direction, one radically incapable of a human condition caught between structures that frame our lives and bones of contention that motivate and elude us--language and culture on the one side, exploitation and desire on the other.

Objectivist discourse, confusing language ability with language, tries to biologize the latter¹² while ignoring exploitation and desire altogether--however convoluted or tendentious explanations of human motivation must be without them. Desire and exploitation are what preclude the self-enclosed mental life objectivists take as axiomatic: the provoking object that would make us whole always slips away, whether in work or in sex, forcing us to cross the doorsteps of others along the pathways of loss in the very act of saying, "I am." It is precisely the systematic refusal to treat desire and exploitation as causal that objectivists confuse with scientificity, limiting themselves to factors internal to the objects called individuals. The results are as inspiring as seventeenth century physics might have produced had it restricted its efforts to categorizing stationary bodies, seeking to deduce cause from correlation (objects located on target ranges are disproportionately full of holes) while stigmatizing the impacts produced by moving bodies as beyond the purview of science.

Systematic inanity tolerates competition poorly, and indeed the ferocity of the postmodern culture wars is a convenient cover for the far more sweeping objectivist campaign to silence modernism itself--the entire skein of dissidence and dissonance that permeated the twentieth century. The two who more than any others ushered in modern theory by exposing the peculiar trajectories of exploitation and desire have become the leading symbols of the new orthodox purge. Marx and Freud's heads are paraded around on stakes as a reminder to potential heretics; we have all heard the litany of their officially decreed sins, blessed even by many of their erstwhile "friends."

Marx's thought is supposed to have lost all credibility when most Leninist-Stalinist regimes collapsed--¹³an assumption presumably based on a complete ignorance of the long tradition of anti-Stalinist and anti-Leninist Marxism,¹⁴ or indeed of Marx's own work, since it's not easy to say why the fall of bureaucratic police states would discredit an advocate of a society of freely associated producers. Well after Marx's death, well before 1917, Lenin and Co. formulated a postponement of worker self-governance to an indefinite, idealized future in favor of rule by a "vanguard" elite Marx had always forcefully opposed.¹⁵ Not a single Leninist revolution (as opposed to Soviet army takeovers) occurred in a predominantly capitalist nation, let alone at the terminally advanced stage of capitalism identified by Marx as prerequisite to socialist revolution. In the post-Leninist consolidation of world capitalism, Marx's predictions about its future course have continued to be ever-more alarmingly correct, explaining its chronic instability, expansionism, class strife, and even details of its technological stages--as economics cannot. His apparently unforgivable error, then, was not that his predicted revolutions crashed--it remains to be seen whether they will ever happen--but that other revolutions which neither he nor anyone else had anticipated used his name. But ever since the Cold War ended, glib slippery slopes and guilt by association have been far more acceptable here than basic distinctions.

Freud's thinking has likewise been obscured behind a slew of gross misinterpretations and personal attacks, compounded in the English-speaking world by mistranslations of much of his theoretical vocabulary. In particular, Verdrängung, which means something like "expulsion" or "driving out"--i.e., from consciousness--is translated as "repression," with the result that people think it identical to, or at least caused by, parental and societal repressiveness (in the ordinary sense). Freud, on the contrary, tells us that social repressiveness is caused by his Verdrängung, a process in which an unacceptable, often sexual idea (not an emotion) is removed from the field of the thinkable and taken over by the formidable strangeness of the unconscious primary process. No matter--it's much easier to interpret Freud as saying neurosis is caused by uptight sexual attitudes, and dismiss his theory because neurosis is more prevalent than ever (though how does anyone know that?) despite a sexual revolution. Indeed, the one thing that seems to unite Freud's legendarily diverse attackers, whose range of disciplines and ideologies greatly reassures those who prefer not to think for themselves,¹⁶ is a near-total ignorance of the concept on which his psychoanalysis was founded--the unconscious, glossed over, misconstrued beyond recognition, or bypassed altogether in commentary after commentary, with all the cumulative profundity of a discourse about Darwin that doesn't mention evolution.¹⁷ This invisible scene from which something I do not recognize speaks through me, subjecting my thoughts and even my body to defining moments in my life history, allowing recombined fragments of yesterday's memories to retroactively give new meaning to long-buried wishes--far from being passe, the Freudian unconscious is hardly any less novel to the English-speaking mainstream now than it was a hundred years ago. Quite unable to process the fact that Freud wrote thousands of pages on sexuality focused on unconscious phantasies and childhood reproductive theories while saying literally nothing about how to make better whoopee, today's well-trained mind reduces him to a very bad sexologist. Witness the universal outrage over the association of his name with "vaginal orgasm"--a term he never used!

Thus the two indispensable modernists have become the Tabooed Two. Their pariah status means nothing but an uncritical embrace of the very idealisms they most irrefutably demolished--the individual as autonomous pilot of her own psychic ship, with capitalism the natural expression of the primal urge to "enterprise." The last fifteen years have proved the point. But the consequences of coerced anti-Marxist consensus began to unfold as far back as the fifties, when national security liberals, craving intellectual rigor but unwilling to question the pro-Cold-War, anti-socialist dogma that was the price of their respectability, began their step by step descent into neoconservatism--for if socialism's unacceptability is a rigid absolute, why should social democracy be more than a tolerable evil?¹⁸ The policy consequence of a return to unfettered Victorian barbarism is now writ large for all to see--girded by an "intellectualism" whose refusal to address the substance of any criticism of capitalism is its very fundament. Once a critique profoundly hits its mark, the breach cannot be healed; its avoidance compels endless evasive maneuvers. That's why the retreat from Freud and Marx has turned into a panicked stampede away from everything they loosely inspired--which happens to include much of modern thought.

It has become a recognized fact--i.e., a dubious assertion repeated many times--that the Tabooed Two's supporters have "retreated" to the humanities after having been cast out of the social "sciences" like Adam and Eve before an enraged God.¹⁹ Not surprisingly, no one tries to date the mythical era when a significant share of social "scientists" were Freudians or Marxists--nor explain how the deliberate exclusion of certain viewpoints from departmental hires constitutes evidence against their validity.²⁰ But the upshot of the canard is that the entire multidisciplinary category of the humanities is now under fire.

To be sure, the less strident, more patronizing anti-modernists are always eulogizing the blessings we owe the Tabooed Two--how much better we now understand the importance of sexuality than before Freud, for example, even if the poor dear greatly exaggerated it. But Freud's whole point is that the very meaning of sexuality is transformed, that it turns out to be a far richer, stranger, and more elusive domain than previously (or currently) conceived--not a mere emphasis on the sexual element. Marx subjects work relations to a similar transformation. His position--that the mode of surplus extraction in the process of production is key to a whole social order--is much more sophisticated than the "economic determinism" usually attributed to him; far from postulating an economic determination of the political, he viewed the very act of work as already political. Their highly theoretical reformulations of the most basic terms of daily life make Freud and Marx nearly incomprehensible in an age in which pragmatism predominates even among theorists.²¹

The failures of free market and free trade policies--already obvious in the early nineties to those not mesmerized by the post-Cold-War ideological extravaganza then in swing--have finally in the last few years coughed up a scrap of a Marx revival. But the very possibility of Freudianism has nearly vanished behind a remarkably sweeping reconceptualization of sexuality, presented as liberating, that evades a Puritanism it lacks the courage to oppose by excluding what Puritans most despise--desire--from the field of sex. The new formulations pose sexuality as a biological need, as a necessary release, as a vehicle of intimate love, as a natural manifestation of attraction, as a healthy self-expression, as a means to the end of pleasure, as a battle for domination, even as a fetish or perversion conceived as a gnarly personal quirk amenable to objectivist explanations--anything but sexuality as driven by desire, or what Freud called a wish--an absolute request, inseparable from its own prohibition, that fantasy can bring to life but no satisfaction can extinguish. The widespread perception that the age of sexual prohibition is over is the upshot, not of any increased tolerance for transgression, but of a misconstrual of sex as nontransgressive. Anyone disputing this misconstrual registers as a Puritan through its lens, since pointing out the transgressiveness of sex can only seem sex-negative in the absence of any space in which sexuality could freely speak its own transgression. Yet that is the very space that Freudianism requires, and that it opened up for desire during an historical moment now closed.

The closure has successfully filled in the approaches to the great problems of modernism, while leaving the problems themselves untouched--a loss in richness but far from a gain in rigor. The objectivist engineers who try to keep the individual isolated and dry with an atheoretic dam meant to power a whole science of humanity have not been able to fix massive breaches ripped open by Freud, Marx, and many others. The engineers' success has depended instead on creating a suspicion around their names and a vacuum around their concepts--so that anyone encountering their thinking is jaundiced and uncomprehending.

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