Theory

The publication of Terry Eagleton’s After Theory appears to have sparked a debate that has been brewing in the wings of Academe for a long time. After more than three decades of autonomous theory, often a strange admixture of structuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, intellectuals are now ready to join a new and dynamic vanguard of anti-theorists.

In the heyday of postmodernism (I’m thinking of the mid-1980’s), everything was a subject, an obscure self shackled by the bonds of a dark and oppressive inheritance—and theory was the great emancipator. James Clifford, for example, in his 1986 work The Predicament of Culture, attempted to overturn the anthropological fascination with the other by emphasizing that we too, were autochthons dreaming in an imagined present. Objectivity, truth, and progress could only be hegemonic terms, authentic only in the eyes of the observer, and so impossibly limited. Whatever was said, was said as ad hoc qualification. The legacy of postmodernism is that of an extended and ignominious apologia for truth, with fear or laziness barring critical minds from access to the real.

While theory crept into every area of academic reflection, it is fair to say that its staunchest advocates dwelt in English departments across the Western world. In some cases, of course, these departments splintered into semi-autonomous centers and institutes, and in their joyous nativity spawned gender studies, post-colonialism, and Marxist critiques of just about everything. It is interesting to note that, unlike the group of analytical Marxists (e.g. Erik Olin Wright, Jon Elster, G.A. Cohen, Phillipe van Parijs, etc), the “Non-Bullshit Marxists,” theorists branding themselves with hammer, sickle, and class consciousness took mostly from the French tradition stemming from Alexandre Kojeve’s famous lectures on Hegel during the 1930’s. The lineage continues, with Hyppolite, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Barthes, Althusser, and countless others. Particularly in Althusser’s bizarre formulation, the chief characteristic of this Marxism was an almost theistic faith in the omnipotence of superstructure, a disembodied field of laws and symbols that invisibly determined the course of human events. Concrete studies of class, economic redistribution, and the rampant inequalities emergent in societies lurching into an ugly and often misunderstood phase of modernity were relegated to curiosa, the trivial vestiges of a theoretical revolution of which only the theorists themselves were cognizant.

And now to the anti-theorists, and a few predictions. First, it seems clear that any anti-theoretical movement is destined for the heights of abstraction. After all, a true anti-theory would simply dismiss the idea of theoretical description altogether, and get on with the real work of understanding society, politics, or literature empirically. They would swap ratiocination for statistical analysis, and interviews for deliberation with their fellow academics. And this is not going to happen, nor is there any compelling reason why it should. Anti-theory, I think, will probably turn out to be some revival of pragmatism, recanonizing American thinkers like James, Dewey, Peirce, and Holmes. Indeed, this anticipated course has already been taken by Judge Posner, in his recent book outlining a pragmatic theory of law and democracy. The idea is an attractive one, particularly because it appeals to the natural aggressiveness of academics for whom postmodernism provided only an oblique outlet. Second, anti-theory will push for a return to things in themselves (Ding an sich), and probably pick up a good dose of phenomenology along the way. The focus, I believe, will be on how to make theory relevant to contemporary problems—and this is hardly a revelatory thought, as much self-justification as scholarly zeal. In any case, we are looking at a change in theory, not an abandonment. And the results will be no more significant for that.

To close, I think it is important to be clear that in all this, normative thinking, about politics, society, and much else, still has a place, and should be largely insensitive to the squabbles of a self-proclaimed theoretical elite. Social and political theory, in its normative guise, has always set out to limn the contours of a possible future, and so only indirectly laments the follies of the present. It is crucial to ponder the basis of a just society, of fairness in the market and in government. To take only the most obvious example, we should realize that Rawls’s fact of pluralism, the empirical observation that there exists a multiplicity of complete and largely irreconcilable worldviews, poses a constant challenge to governments aspiring to greater levels of freedom and democracy, as ours surely does. Theories of politics are of use here, for though they are unlikely to predict our future actions, they can lend our thought and practice a considered consistency often precluded by the frenetic debacles so characteristic of normal democracy at work. They do not make claims so much as suggestions, and these are backed up with that most universal of human abilities, the use of common sense and reason.

The end of theory, were it a real possibility, would be welcome. Though this won’t happen, nothing prevents us from inquiring into the actual possibilities of abstract reflection. As I have argued, these are essentially prescriptive, and this defines both how they should be presented, and more importantly, how they should be put into practice.