Issue Number 14: Awkward Age

Nicholas Dames

The Theory Generation

(On page titled “Theory and the Novel.”)

24 October 2012

Teju Cole. Open City. Random House, 2011.

Jennifer Egan. A Visit From the Goon Squad. Knopf, 2010.

Jeffrey Eugenides. The Marriage Plot. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Ben Lerner. Leaving the Atocha Station. Coffee House Press, 2011.

Sam Lipsyte. The Ask. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

Lorrie Moore. A Gate at the Stairs. Knopf, 2010.

If you studied the liberal arts in an American college anytime

after 1980, you were likely exposed to what is universally

called Theory. Perhaps you still possess some recognizable

talismans: that copy of The Foucault Reader, with the

master’s bald head and piercing eyes emblematic of pure

intellection; A Thousand Plateaus with its Escher-lite line-

drawing promising the thrills of disorientation; the stark,

sickly-gray spine of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics; a stack of

little Semiotext(e) volumes bought over time from the now-

defunct video rental place. Maybe they still carry a faint whiff

of rebellion or awakening, or (at least) late-adolescent

disaffection. Maybe they evoke shame (for having lost touch

with them, or having never really read them); maybe they

evoke disdain (for their preciousness, or their inability to

solve tedious adult dilemmas); maybe they’re mute. But

chances are that, of those studies, they are what remain. And

you can walk into the homes of friends and experience the recognition, wanly amusing or embarrassing, of

finding the very same books.

If so, you belong to what might be called the Theory Generation; and it has recently become evident that

some of its members have been thinking back on their training. They are doing so, moreover, in a form

older than Theory, a form that Theory has done much to denaturalize and demystify (OK, “deconstruct”):

the more or less realist novel, which describes individual lives in a fairly linear manner in conventional, if

elegant or well-crafted, prose. Take, for instance, the protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, a

young woman named Tassie raised in rural Wisconsin, who describes the shock of her first term at her state

university:

Twice a week a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of

sunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I

had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie.

The deadpan Midwestern humor, so pointedly stark in its syntax, brilliantly evokes the moment of initiation

into Theory: spoken over rather than spoken to, Tassie can only, at least at first, receive Theory as a style.

Thad’s read his Eve Sedgwick; Moore clearly alludes to the public controversy surrounding Sedgwick’s

“Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” the 1989 MLA paper that became a touchstone for conservative

think pieces about the decline of academic literary studies. That episode isn’t available to Tassie, however;

for her it’s all just a conversation overheard  — which encapsulates the constant state of Theory in the

American classroom, where debates with concealed or unnamed interlocutors (Derrida with Marx; Foucault

with Hegel) become a cacophony of crossed lines. What is audible to her is intonation, the grain of those

theoretical voices. Put less metaphorically: the way professors dress and talk, the stylistic alternatives they

offer.

The same admixture of the high theoretical and the personal animates a moment in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad:

“What on earth have you got in that backpack?”

It’s Cora, Lou’s travel agent. She hates Mindy, but Mindy doesn’t take it personally  — it’s Structural Hatred, a

term she coined herself and is finding highly useful on this trip. A single woman in her forties who wears high-

collared shirts to conceal the thready sinews of her neck will structurally despise the 23-year-old girlfriend of a

powerful male who not only employs said middle-aged female but is paying her way on this trip.

“Anthropology books,” she tells Cora.

“I’m in the PhD program at Berkeley.”

Older and more self-assured than Tassie, Egan’s Mindy is able to apply Theory directly  — here, by using

Lévi-Strauss to make sense of a complex adult triangle. She is beginning to intuit the promise of using

Theory to read situations in her everyday life: “Mindy has even wondered if her insights on the link between

social structure and emotional response could amount to more than a rehash of Lévi-Strauss — a refinement;

a contemporary application.” But applying Theory to the self, rather than simply being struck by its

strangeness, is just another stage: “She’s only in her second year of coursework.”

For decades it’s been easy to trace the impact of Theory on the novel, but largely in the novel’s more

experimental or formally innovative reaches; for instance, among the Theoretically sanctioned practitioners

of the nouveau roman (Robbe-Grillet, Sollers, Sarraute), or the Anglo-Americans who, after the late ’70s,

seemed intent on adding the torque of Theory to their own narrative twists (from DeLillo to late Pynchon,

Winterson, Foster Wallace, Tom McCarthy, et alia). There still exists a robust cottage industry  — exemplified recently in Judith Ryan’s The Novel After Theory — eager to explain how the contemporary

novel has been making room for Theory, draining it of its rebarbative terminology (and much of its snob

allure), putting it into concrete situations. It’s a vision of a strangely conservative and undialectical

postmodern utopia, in which novelists and critical theorists would march hand in hand, each new theoretical

vista finding its narrative mate, while syllabi virtually constructed themselves.

This rather boring, seemingly “advanced” idea — that Theory would alter the novel’s very DNA, so that it

would no longer be possible to write fiction the same old way  — may hold good for writers working in a

recognizably high-postmodern fashion. But now comes a wave of fiction that tells a more complicated, less

academically consecrated story. Theory, it turns out, might be most interesting not when it changes the form

of fiction, but when it becomes an uneasy part of fiction’s content. In recent novels by college graduates of

the late 1970s or 1980s  — Egan, Moore, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Sam Lipsyte  — and younger

writers, such as Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, Theory is judged from within the forms it tried to dismantle

(psychological realism; the bildungsroman), by criteria Theory could only recognize as regressive or naïve:

What kind of a person does Theory make? What did it once mean to have read theorists? What does it

mean now? How does Theory help you hold a job? Deal with lovers, children, bosses, and parents? Decide

between the restricted alternatives of adulthood? If novelistic realism aspires to be a history of the present,

that present now includes  — in the educations of writers themselves  — the Theory that relegates novelistic

realism to the past.

So far, two responses to this trend are apparent. The first  — common to much of the publicity surrounding

The Marriage Plot; listen, if you can stand it, to Terry Gross’s gleeful sneering about “tropes and signs” in

her interview with Eugenides  — is a desire to have these novels confirm the story of Theory’s demise or

comic irrelevance, so that we may once and for all consign Theory to the vast bin of ’80s kitsch, along with

Duran Duran and shoulder pads. The second, more sensitive response welcomes a realist appraisal of

people steeped in Theory. James Wood, praising Teju Cole’s Open City in the New Yorker, singled out

Cole’s ability to show deep reading in critical theory (Barthes, Benjamin, Said, Deleuze, de Man, and more)

as “simply and naturally part of the whole context of a person.”

The problem is that these novels aren’t at all sure that Theory can be outgrown like fashion; that, having

learned about “tropes and signs,” one can easily dispense with that knowledge. Taken seriously — and for the

most part these novelists take Theory with all the seriousness one might wish, often to the point of comic

effect — Theory explodes the idea that we might know any “whole context” of ourselves. These novels don’t

entirely regret, nor do they entirely accept, Theory; they satirize it with unease. It’s a register best indicated

by the double negative, a perfect example of which is the ruefully perplexed formulation from Lipsyte’s The

Ask, describing — what else? — the narrator Milo’s college days: “We drank local beer, smoked homegrown

and shake. We used words like ‘systemic,’ ‘interpellate,’ ‘apparatus,’ ‘intervention.’ It wasn’t bullshit, I

remember thinking at the time. It just wasn’t not bullshit.”

Of course, it would be a mistake to see the realist novel as somehow anti-intellectual, incapable of engaging

with ideas. In fact, the list of ideas that the novel has comfortably swallowed is motley and daunting.

Associationist psychology (Tristram Shandy); evolutionary biology (Middlemarch, Tess of the D’Urbervilles); finance capitalism (The Way We Live Now, JR); psychoanalysis (Confessions of Zeno);

post-Newtonian physics (The Crying of Lot 49)  — realism has stretched to include these realms and

countless others, many of which — like midcentury existentialism — became standard elements of American

humanistic education. Call them the Ideas of Our Times.

Now think of the much smaller set of ideas that realism can’t readily swallow but can only portray, usually

through emblematic, almost allegorical characters, because these ideas are poised against realism itself:

convulsive, revolutionary political energy; transformative religious fervor. Call these the great Others of

realism, recurrently ready to find realism’s small-scale focus and individual humanism either complicit or

weak. To which set does Theory (be it of poststructuralist, rhizomatic, or Frankfurt-school coloration)

belong?

A good comparison might be found in the great Russian realists of the 19th century. Nihilism in Turgenev

or utilitarian utopianism in Dostoevsky: these aren’t ideas that the novel has to, or even can, assimilate; it

can only acknowledge their existence. Turgenev’s Bazarov and Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin implicitly reject the

assumptions — liberal, individual, psychological, ameliorative  — of the form in which they are rendered. The

very idea of novel-writing, in the world as they conceive it, is regressive in the extreme: thus Bazarov

dismisses the Schiller and Goethe of Nikolai Kirsanov, his friend’s father, and expresses his preference for

the materialism of Ludwig Büchner’s Stoff und Kraft. These characters and the ideas they incarnate are at

least potentially like Theory: they stem from a new, fringe kind of education, hostile to what they perceive as

the backwardness of novelistic narration, and speak for an understanding of the world that would make

nonsense of the (novelistic) individual. The novel responds accordingly by plotting their demise while

allowing us some lingering attachment to these doomed rebels; thus the logic of plot and that of human

experience are seen to cohere in “the way of the world.”

But do the Theory-trained characters of novels like The Corrections, The Ask, or The Marriage Plot possess anything close to the demonic energy of a nihilist like Bazarov? You can imagine them talking

to Bazarov — even agreeing with him most of the time  — but by comparison they seem harmless, at the mercy

of the world Theory has equipped them to deconstruct. Temperamentally they seem closer to Tolstoy’s

kind-hearted searchers; Theory is for them like Freemasonry for Pierre Bezukhov, a seductive phase of

education that is finally too cultish and self-enclosed to make sense of the world’s upheavals. Or perhaps it’s

more like homosexuality in Evelyn Waugh: a maturational phase that has to be abandoned in order to take

one’s place in the social order. (The Ask‘s Milo, again, on his college education: “I learned about late

capitalism. And how to snort heroin.” To which his interlocutor, a streetwise and profane older lawyer, says:

“Did they teach you anything about being a man while you were learning about late capitalism, whatever the

fuck that is?”) Does Theory threaten to break apart the norms of the realist world, or do we just need to

wait for these characters to outgrow their reading?

This is the odd space these Theory Generation novels inhabit, making them peculiar novels of ideas.1

Their

writers have read enough Theory at a young enough age to be in continued thrall to its power; they do

justice to the disorienting shock those texts once had, and perhaps still have. Yet they are old enough to

ironize (tenderly or bitterly) that power. Their depictions veer from caustic to nostalgic to regretful; their

fictional readers of Theory are disappointed, maladaptive skeptics. It is as if the too-human frailty of these

characters means that they fall short of the demands of Theory  — a cunningly ironic demonstration (of a kind

familiar from the entire history of realist fiction) that these demands might fall short of human needs.

If you had to pick the first shot in this conflict, you could do worse than reread the section in The Corrections in which Chip Lambert, former holder of an “assistant professorship in Textual Artifacts,”

teacher of “Consuming Narratives,” lecturer on phallic anxiety in Tudor drama, and casualty of a drug-

fueled affair with an undergraduate, heads repeatedly to the Strand Bookstore to sell his large, costly

collection of Theory. It is a miniature triumph of realist notation at its most aggressive. Starting with his

Marxist theorists, whose collective sticker price of $3,900 is knocked down to $65, Chip works his way

through “his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers”

to raise money for expensive dinners to impress a new girlfriend. Reduced at the end to “his beloved

cultural historians,” Chip “piled his Foucault and Greenblatt and hooks and Poovey into shopping bags and

sold them all for $115.” The pathetic, specific numbers, the terribly accurate roster of names (not just

famous Continental names, but the kind of American academics that demonstrate Franzen’s realist-insidery

expertise): this is what Theory is worth.

Scenes in which the vain things of this world are sold  — auctions, foreclosures, negotiations with

pawnbrokers — occur often in realist fiction, always expressing the hard principle that our ideals don’t

translate into market terms. In the end, our fantasies or desires or self-delusions come to the bar, not of

Truth, but of what others will give us for them.

Franzen (Swarthmore ’81), Eugenides (Brown ’83), Egan (Penn ’85), and Lipsyte (Brown ’90), among

others, were well placed to observe the first vehement arrivals of Theorists in the classroom. Theory felt

then — and perhaps still does, in a more routinized way  — as esoteric and mysterious and potentially

demoralizing as any other adult experience that college promised. The battle seemed epic: it pitted the

Makers of Things — poets, novelists — against the Unmakers of Ideologies. The price of entry to many

humanistic disciplines, in many corners of America, was to choose the latter. Not that it was a hard choice.

Everything around you — public discourse, social demands, economic ironies  — demanded critique. “We

were stuck between meanings,” The Ask‘s Milo recalls. “Or we were the last dribbles of something. It was

hard to figure. The fall of the Soviet Union, this was, the death of analog. The beginning of aggressively

marketed nachos.”

Among other things, it was the moment — call it the long 1980s — when the American university, no longer

content to describe or study the socially critical function that artistic avant-gardes had claimed as their own

for over a century, became itself the host for the avant-garde. This was literally the case  — universities began

to house and pay significant European thinkers at the moment their influence in their native lands began to

wane. Unlike their predecessors who arrived before and during World War II, figures such as Derrida did

not come merely to wait out a conflict. Instead they came to conquer, with newly formed journals, reshaped

departments, grad-student protégés and acolytes, and translations produced by university presses and read

in pedagogical contexts. The result was the institutionalization of Theory, its submission to the logic of an

academic market that demanded regular infusions of new insight; but it was also the transformation of the

institution itself, which now began to think of itself as ineluctably avant-garde in function.

There were ironies. Among the cheapest was the complaint that these theoretical avant-gardistes were,

thanks to employment and tenure, comfortably middle-class — a complaint that ignores the long tendency of

Western modernity to remunerate its critics. The more potent irony was that by transforming itself into an

engine for critique, the academy ceased to believe in the goal of socialization  — making good citizens — that

was still one of its functions. (As Richard Rorty had it, the price higher education paid to keep this irony

unexamined was to cede secondary education to conservatives.) At the center of this irony was the liberal

arts student, tasked with learning to critique social norms before having consciously or fully lived them. It is

both socially and aesthetically significant that so much recent virtuoso realism has come from writers who

were undergraduates at precisely this moment, often in the places where Theory had most prestige.

To combat claims that realism was a source of critical knowledge — be it knowledge in the mode of Zola’s

gritty naturalism, or Henry James’s more psychologized motto, “Try to be one of the people on whom

nothing is lost“ — Theory made a sneaky move in the game by claiming to speak for true critique. The

critique of realism — the naïveté of its faith in representation; its complicity with banal cultural narratives  — was

leavened by the sneaking fondness for realism that theorists themselves, even the most canonical, exhibited.

Recall Barthes on Flaubert, Deleuze or Kristeva on Proust, Adorno on Balzac, Jameson on Gissing.

Jameson in particular devoted himself to a patient explanation of how, in a certain historical moment,

realism served a critical function, however distant that moment might now be.

For the student, it didn’t take much insight to see that realism was to be pitied. Dismissed as (pick your

favorite) politically inert, bourgeois, retrograde; just another series of conventions and codes, mannered and

risible as local TV news; or — worst of all — sheerly middlebrow, realism could match neither the smooth

avant-gardiste whose visible disdain for the rest of the party attracts admiring glances, nor the genre novelist

whose belly laugh loosens up the room. A concern for everyday compromise, an interest in lyricism

straitened by recognizable syntax, some sardonic humor, a bit of adultery, or debt: the creaky old realist

novel was no one’s first choice to take home. It didn’t seem up to offering critique or getting us from one

meaning to the next, unless it had Theory as a wingman.

By the end of the ’90s, the easy equation that Theory gave you  — realism is a tool of capitalist rationality, a

product and not an imaginative artifact, a tool of the status quo  — had the feel of a truism. But once an

argument hardens into a truism, a response is likely already underway. The Corrections provided an early

version of this response. It isn’t hard to detect the buried affection for Theory in Franzen’s narration of

Chip’s desperate liquidation sale. Theory is still an informing presence in these novels; they are, of course,

stories about reification, alienation, and particularly  — a term obsessively, if gingerly, employed  — late

capitalism. But by 2001, Theory had become  — at least for students, ex-students, and academics — part of the

furniture of their lives, in no need of defense and yet scarcely revolutionary. It was no longer the key to all

the world’s things, but rather just another thing-in-the-world. This very banality was what Franzen drew

upon: by becoming routine, Theory had gone from object of fear, or satire, or hero worship, to something

novelistic. And the novel, particularly the kind that relied on social detail and individual destinies (and in the

case of Franzen, on the bourgeois nuclear family), was spoiling for a fight, trying to win back its eclipsed

prestige.

No small fact, then, that so many of these novels take the shape of the bildungsroman, that most antique of

realist modes. The punctured innocence of Moore’s Tassie, the callowness of Egan’s Mindy — these are

paradigmatic steps on the way to an education in Theory. First comes getting used to a style (of insouciance,

strange combinations, rejection of middle-class norms); next is learning to use it to make sense of your own

maturation. François Cusset coined the term bildungstheorie to describe how Theory operates in the

American setting, and Moore and Egan — neither of whom have written novels explicitly about Theory; these

are distinctly modern bildungsromane  — know that Theory is now, for an American college graduate of a

certain kind, part of the sociology of late adolescence. Theory is swallowed by the ordinary developmental

processes that it so often sought to disrupt.

This is one way in which contemporary realism has its revenge on Theory: narrating it as just another part of

growing up a college-educated American. The revenge, though, takes interesting tonal forms. Eugenides’s

The Marriage Plot is full of details rendered with such tender mockery that they seem as affectionate as

satirical: the formerly New Critical professor who had “met Roland Barthes at a dinner party and been

converted, over cassoulet, to the new faith”; the student in the semiotics seminar who proclaims that “I’m

finding it hard to introduce myself, actually, because the whole idea of social introductions is so

problematized”; the novel’s heroine waiting anxiously to hear the correct pronunciation of the names that

were as yet only opaque signs (”Bart. So that was how you pronounced it”). Here Eugenides combats

Theory in a register even more effective than Franzen’s satire: nostalgia. What do you do to Theory when

you treat it fondly? You make it into one of the wonderful follies of youth: so good to have had them; so

good to be beyond them.

Eugenides’s novel is suffused with affection: for its time, its characters, and their ideas; and his characters are

remarkably affectionate with one another, as if already imagining themselves in a roseate future anterior.

This fondness is not quite echoed by other recent novels of the Theory Generation. From other

perspectives it seems less possible to look back fondly, because Theory and the thinking it occasions are still

present, still haunting characters, still intervening inconveniently between cognition and action. Here,

perhaps, the realist novel about Theory-readers gains its best traction. If — to take three excellent recent

examples — the protagonists of The Ask, Open City, and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station aren’t

living out the kind of traditional courtship and bildung narrative employed so knowingly in The Marriage Plot, it is because they’ve become so suspicious of plot that they refuse forward momentum. They wander,

drop in and out of neighborhoods, cities, jobs, and relationships, finding experience itself only through a

scrim of irony.

These are novels about consumers. These are people who are given to consuming books, particularly books

about other books. It is entirely characteristic that, in the opening pages of Open City, the narrator Julius

visits his aging college mentor, a Japanese-American scholar of medieval literature, then proceeds to the

closing sale of the Lincoln Center Tower Records to go through the classical CD bins. These are receptive

people — their characteristic act is taking in, choosing, evaluating, rejecting. Among the things they are

choosing is a framework through which to apprehend the world. Theory doesn’t feel futuristic in these

novels; in a slightly different register from The Marriage Plot, but with a similar temporal dynamic, it feels

late, a voice from the past that only provokes dissatisfaction.

Consumption isn’t quite the heart of the matter, however. What allies Lipsyte’s Milo, Cole’s Julius, and

Lerner’s Adam — a poet spending a desultory fellowship year in Spain, before and after the 2004 Madrid

train bombings — is how fundamentally diagnostic they are. Theory has taught them to treat the world as a set

of deceptive signs; they doubt, reflexively, the communications of others. (They aren’t always wrong to do

so.) Lerner’s Adam even ruminates on the impossibility this condition creates for the novel:

And when I read the New York Times online, where it was always the deadliest day since the invasion began,

I wondered if the incommensurability of language and experience was new, if my experience of my

experience issued from a damaged life of pornography and privilege, if there were happy ages when the starry

sky was the map of all possible paths, or if this division of experience into what could not be named and what

could not be lived just was experience, for all people for all time. Either way, I promised myself, I would

never write a novel.

The references to Adorno’s Minima Moralia (“damaged life”) and Lukács’s Theory of the Novel (“happy

ages”) are not just grace notes but essential aspects of the dilemma: Adam has been thoroughly educated in

a school of symptomology, and the phenomena of the world have become, as a result, a series of signs, not

expressions or communications. Julius in Open City sees New York as suffering the neurosis of having

repressed its violent, slaving past, which his education leads him constantly to unmask; he mistakes a “dark

canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind” for “the body of a lynched man dangling

from a tree.” Lerner’s novel circles restlessly around artistic experiences  — poetry readings, museum visits,

overheard songs — that provoke only a pained self-consciousness about how impossible it is to feel absorbed

by them, as if what art now provides is occasion for ruminating on absent raptness. Eugenides, in a more

obviously comic register, shows his characters relentlessly tripping over their autoskepticism: “More

worryingly, Mitchell had to ask himself if he wasn’t being just as knee-jerk in resisting the charge of misogyny

as college feminists were in leveling it, and if his resistance didn’t mean that he was, somewhere deep down,

prone to misogyny himself. Why, after all, had he bought A Moveable Feast in the first place? Why,

knowing what he did about Claire, had he decided to whip it out of his backpack at this particular moment?

Why, in fact, had the phrase whip it out just occurred to him?” A relentless analytical drive, oriented toward

the slippery nature of signs, is the constant mark of these novels, but it is a drive described and not

reproduced. Realism depends upon faith, however tenuous, in the trustworthiness of signs. It isn’t a faith

these protagonists can easily share, and so they lurk uncomfortably in their own novels. In the case of Cole’s

Julius, whose novel ends by springing a sinister trapdoor, they may not even be aware of the most important

elements of their own stories.

“I’m finding it hard to introduce myself, actually, because the whole idea of social introductions is so

problematized”: it’s a good joke. Semiotics was an exemplary introduction to Theory because it could so

starkly diagnose the conventions  — some of them innocuous, some of them harmful  — that governed the

smallest aspects of everyday life; and other avenues of Theory did, and still do, explain how those

conventions came to be. Once you learned this habit of thought it was hard to forget it. You might never be

as literal about it as Eugenides’s poor collegiate semiotician, but if you gave it more than a moment’s

grudging attention, it changed you.

It could also change you into a spectator, an omniskeptic, leading a diluted affective existence. This is where

the realism of the Theory Generation steps in to redress the balance, or at least to illustrate the dilemma.

It’s a strange office for realist fiction. But if the death of the author, which these authors learned about in

their college years, has spurred a response (We’re still here!), it has also spurred a new rationale for an old

mode: to explore the consequences — in lost urgency, lost feeling, or lost expressiveness  — of a life lived as a

series of symptoms to be read.

Cole and Lerner are younger than the first wave of Theory Generation novelists, and the difference tells.

Their novels are even looser in form than Franzen’s or Lipsyte’s or Moore’s, more solitary and lyrical in

their first-person voices, less given to the comedy of social friction. They echo the monologic reveries of the

self-consciously failed novels of formation from a century ago: Mann’s Tonio Kröger, Musil’s Young Törless, Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (it isn’t irrelevant that Lerner is better known as a poet),

Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, Kafka’s Amerika, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Erudite misfits, well-schooled and skeptical, who by taking their educations so seriously have disabled

themselves from the supposed rewards of education: these figures stand for a social crisis in maturation,

where the lessons of school — classical studies, militarism, scholastic theology, Kultur — no longer connect to

effective socialization. So with Cole’s Julius and Lerner’s Adam: bookish and diffident, they are excellent

products of Theory, insofar as they have been thoroughly acculturated into the culture of anti-acculturation.

They do not seem to expect their educations to have equipped them for the world they face. Whereas

Eugenides’s or Lipsyte’s characters are surprised by the disjunction, they take it as a given. Lipsyte is a

contemporary master of the rant; Cole and Lerner tend toward reverie.

Tonio Kröger on his situation: “I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in

consequence.” This might stand as a motto for any of the novels of the Theory Generation. Theory was,

whatever its many internal disagreements and comic excesses, not just diagnostic but utopian  — a training in

interpreting the world as a path toward changing it. If it was meant to socialize you at all, it was meant to

socialize you for the different world to come: a world of genuine difference genuinely encountered, a world

less in thrall to the false gods of Normality and Pathology, a world that would be more transparent and, as a

result, less painful. In their variously rueful ways, these novels remind us of the utopianism of Theory by

writing its epitaph.

Because what does Theory do for its former students in these novels? It hasn’t prepared them for a new

world; instead, it’s given them a way to survive, just barely, in the old one. Having learned well the

poststructuralist critique of positions  — the necessary exclusions and erasures by which any “position” is

made possible — they are eminently flexible, admirably uncommitted ironists. Their novels leave them in

temporary limbos that promise only more temporary limbos to come. Lipsyte’s Milo, having long

abandoned painting, loses his white-collar development job and finds himself working for a local contractor.

Lerner’s Adam floats through a fellowship, after which he will return to the US to nothing certain at all. The

music industry that is the subject of Egan’s book doesn’t collapse so much as quietly shrink, undergoing

what Mindy might call a “structural” adjustment. Theory, it turns out, is less intellectually powerful than

emotionally useful; it habituates you to the anomic, precarious existence you were destined to lead in any

case. It was like a drug after all: not hallucinogenic or mind-expanding, but rather pleasantly sedating.

Why such a low-stakes portrayal of what a humanistic education gives you? Because the habit of diagnostic,

symptomatic analysis these characters embody is not defeated by the fiendishly well-encoded secrets of

Capital or Power so much as rendered inert by a world without secrets, or symptoms, at all. Who needs to

reveal the codes through which ideology speaks when ideology speaks plainly? When power dispenses with

alibis? Or when power, in the form of Purdy, Milo’s college friend turned big-shot capitalist, speaks of his

college gang like this: “They’ll think they are special and that they suffer in distinct ways, but they are all

hurtling down the same world-historical funnel. They will attempt to professionalize their passions, or else

just get jobs. Some will do better than others. Some won’t have to do better because of their trust funds.

Despite what are often radically different fashion aesthetics, not to mention politics, they are all

fundamentally the same.” Forget surfaces and codes, forget symptoms and ideological ruses, forget secrets

and conspiracies: the ways in which these characters are exploited, used, manipulated, and discarded are as

obvious as their all-too-human needs for a little comfort, a little belonging, a little safety. In that kind of

world, less secure and polite than the world they were schooled in, hermeneutics scarcely registers as a skill;

it’s at best a habit of self-soothing. It allows you to think that when you’re talked to this way, something else

might be going on. The dark joke  — and it’s a joke realism has always been good at making  — is that nothing

else is: the cynicism of power is just that cynical.

It’s an inversion that might be one of the signature ironies of these novels: Theory was right all along, just in

the wrong ways. “Late capitalism”: can any concept be more germane to Milo’s unraveling life? “Discourse”:

as Eugenides’s Madeleine slowly learns, it’s a useful shorthand for the illusion of our uniqueness,

particularly the uniqueness of our ability to anatomize social discourses. “Damaged life”: nothing else

expresses so well the woundedness of Adam, who invents fictional alibis for others  — such as the “fascism” of

his kind, liberal Midwestern father — to produce the symptom that’s not really there. Their narratives bear

out what they were taught, but in far more literal form. If they took from their exquisitely expensive

schooling an elegantly deconstructive cast of mind, what it turns out they needed was to have trusted

Theory’s most reductive, blunt, brutally plain lessons instead. It’s a funny, eminently realist kind of warning:

Forget the hermeneutics of suspicion. Remember what you’ve suspected all along — what, looking around

you, you can hardly avoid suspecting. Be one of those on whom nothing, not even Theory, is lost.

1

In addition to the writers already mentioned, the number of recent American novels that contain Theory-wise

graduate students — Norman Rush’s Mating, Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening, Allegra Goodman’s The

Cookbook Collector, and so on — is impressive. British novelists, by contrast, often take on Theory and theorists

through the question of literary biography after the “death of the author,” as in A. S. Byatt’s Possession or Alan

Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. For most American writers Theory is less a matter of how to think of a writer’s

life than how to think of a student’s.

http://nplusonemag.com/the-theory-generation

Image: Paperback cover art for The Marriage Plot. By: Henry Sene Yee.

Of Interest »

[In Review] Theory in the Real World Nov. 19, 2012, 11:33 a.m.

Nicholas Dames' article about the generation exposed to Theory in the institutionalized context of the

university classroom is not without some surprising parts. But at the heart of his essay is a consideration of

the effects of Theory (he gives it an honorary capital, and so will we) on a life, which takes a tired criticism of

the University—that it no longer adequately prepares its students for the "real world”—and makes it

something worthy of serious consideration.

The most striking instance of this comes as an implicit question: Can a student take his education too

seriously? Dames' materials are six novels written by authors who grew up with Theory and semiotics as a

dominating part of their university education, and so the answer for their doomed "bookish and diffident"

characters is of course "yes." Its effects can be comic and deleterious: a semiotics student in The Marriage Plot proclaims “I’m finding it hard to introduce myself, actually, because the whole idea of social

introductions is so problematized.”

But the comedy is born out of serious considerations—"What kind of a person does Theory make? What

did it once mean to have read theorists? What does it mean now? How does Theory help you hold a job?

Deal with lovers, children, bosses, and parents? Decide between the restricted alternatives of adulthood?"--

the kind of questions that Theory "could only recognize as regressive or naive." The problem with Theory

exhibited by these novels is that it is not of this world. It is too forward-looking, almost apocalyptic in the

way that it prepares students, not for the world they will actually enter, but for "the different world to come: a

world of genuine difference genuinely encountered... a world that would be more transparent and, as a

result, less painful." Dames calls it "utopian," "a training in interpreting the world as a path toward changing

it." And so it is by "taking their educations so seriously" that these novels' characters "disabled themselves

from the supposed rewards of education."

But could we not just as easily say that these characters are simply failed readers? It seems that it is not

necessarily Theory, not a too-serious investment in what they were taught that has failed these "erudite

misfits" but a misunderstanding in what interpretation of this sort is for. A good reading is productive; it

reveals the ways in which meaning can be negotiated from a text. But this is precisely where Theory's

forward-looking character is most profitable: it points to the manifold ways in which texts, people, the world

resist attempts at interpretation. If these novels' characters are looking for a world that is less painful as a

result of its transparency, of course they are disappointed and ill-equipped to encounter it. But if we look

toward all of the endless generative means by which we can continue to encounter others and the world and

even derive pleasure or fulfillment from our experience of seeing through a glass darkly, there should be no

reason why we can't also grasp these meanings and live a life that is both resolute in seeing the world as it is

and intent on exploring its possibilities.

http://www.binst.org/news/35/

Nicholas Dames on "The Theory Generation"

Many of us remember, with a mixture of reverence and awe, the time we were first

introduced to the Colossus known as Theory. Although this may have occurred during a

period of mid-adolescent angst for the more precocious of my peers, my introduction

took place in the Fall of 2009 during my freshman year at Wes, when the now-retired

hyperpolyglot, exegetical wizard, and overall badass Howard Needler assigned our

Language FYI to read the essay "Myth Today" published in Roland Barthes'

Mythologies. This led to many a mind-blowing discussion among this all-freshman class

about whether, like, words really mean anything, and like, whether our whole system of

understanding the world is just, you know, a totally lame attempt to conceal and displace

its undeniable Meaninglessness.

Since then, my understanding of Theory has gotten a bit more nuanced, if no less tied to the same desire to have my

mind continuously and radically blown. With this has come the knowledge that many of the most important texts in

the theory canon were written thirty, forty, or fifty years ago, and that since then they've been subject to both academic

and public reconsideration, rejection, redaction, and outright mockery. Just take this opening paragraph in a recent

book review of Gary Gutting's Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960:

Are the theory wars over? Twenty-five years ago you couldn't cocoa your cappuccino without someone accusing you of floating a signifier, much less close down the, ahem, discourse with a simple "I prefer my coffee that way". Who is this mythic "I", the theorists wanted to know, and how could he presume to know what he prefers? Has he forgotten

he's as fictional as Oliver Twist or Mrs Dalloway? Doesn't he know that his likes and dislikes are as ideologically determined as the medium-term financial strategy?

This is the world that acolytes of Theory have been coming of age in for the last ten or fifteen years, one that politely

nods at the impossibility of meaning and the inherent late-capitalist bias in our very conceptualization of the issues

facing the world before telling us all about its new consulting job. Memoirs like "I Was an Under-Age Semiotician"

characterize the act of looking back on our undergraduate Theory years as an inevitable part of growing up; there

appears to be a certain brand of poetics when it comes to waxing nostalgic about youthful intellectual folly.

Experimenting with drugs, sex, and Poststructuralist epistemic modes is what college is all about--make sure you get it

all out of your system then, because you won't have the opportunity for that kind of indulgence when you're older.

In his N+1 article "The Theory Generation" (shout-out to ksutton for sending it to me), Nicholas Dames investigates

how many of today's contemporary writers have been dealing with the changing critical landscape in this Post-

postmodern world of ours, giving us protagonists whose relationships with Theory are as strange and estranged as our

own. I've only read two of the novels he discusses--Emperor Franzen's The Corrections, now more-or-less a crown

jewel of the contemporary canon, and Sam Lipsyte's The Ask, which over the course of my reading threw me into

alternating fits of laughter and existential terror--but I don't think my neophytism has left me any worse for the wear.

Dames's article is a brilliantly written and insightful piece on where Theory stands today, both in the world at large

and in the lives of those who have come to (intellectual) maturity in its decentering, designifying wake.

http://pyxisjournal.com/new-blog/2012/10/26/the-theory-generation

Deconstructing the Theory Generation

November 3, 2012 By Sean Murphy

I spent some time this morning reading (well, skimming) a mostly fascinating piece from n + 1 magazine. The author

is Nicholas Dames and the essay is entitled “The Theory Generation”. Check it out here.

This is how it begins. If you are inspired to keep reading, click on the link above.

If you studied the liberal arts in an American college anytime after 1980, you were likely exposed to what is

universally called Theory. Perhaps you still possess some recognizable talismans: that copy of The Foucault Reader,

with the master’s bald head and piercing eyes emblematic of pure intellection; A Thousand Plateaus with its Escher-

lite line-drawing promising the thrills of disorientation; the stark, sickly-gray spine of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics; a

stack of little Semiotext(e) volumes bought over time from the now-defunct video rental place. Maybe they still carry a

faint whiff of rebellion or awakening, or (at least) late-adolescent disaffection. Maybe they evoke shame (for having lost

touch with them, or having never really read them); maybe they evoke disdain (for their preciousness, or their inability

to solve tedious adult dilemmas); maybe they’re mute. But chances are that, of those studies, they are what remain.

And you can walk into the homes of friends and experience the recognition, wanly amusing or embarrassing, of

finding the very same books.

If so, you belong to what might be called the Theory Generation; and it has recently become evident that some of its

members have been thinking back on their training.

My own (comparatively succinct, less, well, theory-laden) take, from a piece entitled “Deconstruction” (excerpted

from my memoir) is below.

I.

Il n’y pas hors-texte.

Or, there is nothing outside the text.

If the names Barthes, Foucault and Saussure (for starters) mean nothing to you, it would be difficult to argue that you

are missing much. And yet: in the autumn of 1992 I spent more time with these gentlemen than I did with actual,

living people. You see, they were all literary theorists, and they were all dead. I arrived at grad school expecting to

become more intimately acquainted with some of my favorite Russian authors and dive deeper into American

literature.

This happened to be right around the time that Cultural Studies had infiltrated English departments with the fervor of

a rotavirus. It is tempting to say I was unlucky in this regard; as it happened, I was also fortunate in ways I did—and did

not—perceive at the time. To put it as plainly as possible, if the circumstances had been different, the likelihood that I

would be writing these words right now is less than remote. I almost certainly would be, if I was lucky enough, a

tenured professor. I also, most likely, would be well into my second decade crafting articles for scholarly journals that

not even my friends would read, nor would I, being a good friend, want them to.

Long story short: after initially resisting the jargon, the unending analysis (which was initially like watching a Fellini

movie on mushrooms) and the impenetrable pretension, I was, for a time, converted. Once the signifying pieces fell

into place, I began to appreciate the maddening method of making molehills into mountains. Post-structuralism can

quickly become a metaphysical cult, and once the scales fall from your eyes, you embrace the oddly cathartic notion

that there will be a ceaseless stream of scales to be pulled off every day for the rest of your life.

As a result, like a soldier who has spent time on the front line, these experiences informed my subsequent relation to

reality. Today, I carry deconstruction like a tool in my trunk anytime I need to change a flat tire in my critical acumen.

For a while there I was not sure I would be able to read, much less write fiction ever again. Eventually, I learned how

to think without seeing myself thinking, but it took many years to sluice all that onanism out of my system.

What are they after?

I came away from this experience mostly unsullied, intellectually speaking, and am glad for it (the experience and the

lack of permanent damage). I came away convinced that, when it comes to art, theory and philosophical concerns

certainly have an important place, but not at the expense of the work itself. Perhaps this is why, to this day, I find that

actual writers compose the most insightful and convincing reviews and appraisals of fiction (and non-fiction, for the

most part). Maybe, if I were to deconstruct my own line of thinking, I’m unintentionally (or purposefully) prejudicing

my perspective as the more thoughtful, balanced one. Regardless, academia is, in its extremes, like any cult: it is

usually worthwhile to avoid any group convinced they have figured out the secrets of the universe, particularly when

the answers involve the creation of more, unnecessary questions.

II.

Toujours déjà.

What are we after?

From the moment my mother stopped living, everything that has happened can, of course, be measured along the

continuum of before and after. But being alive, still, I now am unable to recall anything that happened before without

some awareness that she is dead; that she will die. This happens in the abstract (the knowledge is there, which doesn’t

change the memory, but it alters, however subtly, the process of remembering), but it also affects specific times and

dates: I will recall an event from 1998 and some part of me thinks—or is simply aware in advance—how she will be

gone in four years. An occasion from 2002 will prompt the troubling question: eight months left; she had no idea and

neither did we. And so on.

It gets even more complicated during dreams. And that is only addressing the ones I remember, and the ones I

remember remind me that most of us are dreaming constantly, endlessly, every night, creating screenplays and

scenarios, concocting future stories while revisiting past mistakes or triumphs or slipping darkly through the glass into

impossible escapades—the type that could only happen in heaven, or dreams, or else a Fellini movie.

In these dreams and in my memories my mother is always-already deceased. I am always-already predisposed to deal

with her death, just like I can’t remember attending church without the eventual loss of faith, or my post-graduate

studies without the abrupt decision to flee the ivory tower, or my ongoing quest to construct mysteries I might solve

only through writing.

Mostly, perceiving existence through this lens applies to looking forward as well as looking backward. Knowing, ahead

of time, how certain decisions or actions are likely to play out (based on experience, based on characters from books,

based on intuition) obliges one to avoid clichés. This insight, a sort of prognostic radar, can be as paralyzing as it is

liberating: you don’t want to make any moves that will contribute to a life someone else already lived, but you also

don’t want to preclude the fortuity of chance. If you think too much you can outsmart the future, or else become

Bartleby, preferring to do nothing in order to preserve the illusion of an unfettered free will.

III.

The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.

Czeslaw Milosz, one of the great artists of the last century, was both a poet and a professor. He could appreciate

literature from both angles: the creation of it as a writer and the appreciation of it as a reader. Having seen some of

the atrocity humankind was capable of during his lifetime, his work uses words to elegize, accuse and above all, to

remember. His great obsession was doing his part to ensure that the suffering and the bravery and the cruelty were a

little less possible to ignore and forget. His poetry, in part because of its brilliance but mostly because of its restraint,

all but resists analysis: he knows what he is trying to say and you know what he is trying to say. It’s more than that; it’s

always more than that. Like all the best poetry, the deceptively simple words are fraught with feeling and affect. You

cannot, in short, deconstruct Czeslaw Milosz.

I came across a poem of his around 1993 that I strongly suspect would have affected me in a profound fashion

whether I encountered it before or after grad school. It does, nevertheless, seem to epitomize—with astonishing clarity

and conciseness—what miserable if well-meaning theorists spend chapters and careers agonizing to articulate half as

well.

What I know of my laborious life: it was lived…

I don’t need to write memos and letters every morning. Others will take over, always with the same hope, The one we know is senseless and devote our lives to…

So the Earth endures, in every petty matter

And in the lives of men, irreversible. And it seems a relief. To win? To lose?

What for, if the world will forget us anyway.

Poets and professors are ultimately in search of similar things: not necessarily the answers to specific questions but the

process of discovering, and interrogating the things that perplex us. It is not the answers or even the questions but the

act of investigating: that dissatisfaction; not an act of rebellion or defiance, but an appreciation and, ultimately,

acceptance that we can’t know. We can never know but we must try.

This, it seems to a former altar boy and once-future scholar, is the most satisfactory elucidation of what impels us to

learn and love and live.

*From a non-fiction work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone.

http://bullmurph.com/2012/11/03/deconstructing-the-theory-generation/

SSppiirr iitt iiss aa BBoonnee

Jonathan Franzen / Lacan

In Defense of Theory

Daniel Tutt Posted on December 5, 2012

In a blog that I deeply respect, Marginal Utility, Rob Horning writes of Theory Cults and particularly about how

the “Cult of Lacan” functioned in his comparitive-literature seminars during graduate school. Horning dismisses

Lacan as a religio-based prophet who was ultimately a narcissistic intellectual incapable of real emotional

relations. As a result, he claims that Lacan over-compensated for his lack of any human relationships by creating

a cult that required more and more jargon and complexity to ultimately understand.

Every one of Lacan’s intimates can attest to his narcissistic personality, but the problem with this argument is that

Horning refers to Richard Webster to validate his disdain with the esoteric nature of theory, and Lacan in

particular. Webster has made a living de-bunking Freud in a conservative and authoritarian manner, often based

on specious, and frankly envious lines of thought. For example, Webster criticizes Lacan for attending Kojeve’s

lectures on Hegel – implying that Kojeve was a charlatan who led the 20th century’s great thinkers down a path

of utter obscurity.

What Webster is after at the end of the day seems to be positivistic science, and a full fledged support for ego

psychology, and neuroscience, all devoid of theory. Forget all theoretical pretensions and interdisciplinarity.

These are the signs of a fake, of a hack, of someone who is not original.

Well, please do me a favor: name one philosopher who did not pull from a number of the most ground

breaking discoveries in science, biology, and other schools of philosophy during their own time? Webster

criticizes Elizabeth Rudinesco, Lacan’s biographer, for not offering any criticism of his teachings and lionizing

him to the same degree as his faithful students. Well, Webster should read the response that Orthodox

Lacanians have to Rudinesco. His critique is useless because it is dismissive of psychoanalysis tout court, thus

rendering the entire practice faulty.

To even bring his essay into conversation with Webster shows that Horning is not interested in any serious or

nuanced critique of Lacan. I’d recommend reading thinkers such as Jean Laplanche and other so called

“traitors” to the Lacanian school to understand Lacan’s shortcomings. For that matter, read Anti-Oedipus to

fully appreciate the co-optation of psychoanalysis towards the authoritarian and repressive. Webster claims that

Lacan’s entire system of thought is in response to his own emotional issues, and Horning relates this emotional

disconnectedness to how he himself felt in comp-lit seminars during grad school.

Lacan was an alienated intellectual who hugely overvalues his own intellect and cognitive skills, and has

become almost completely cut off from the world of ordinary human relationships” — serves as a pretty

good description of what I remember of myself in graduate school. His judgment of Lacan’s theory, that

it is “a fiction created by an intellectual in order to alleviate his own emotional predicament,” reminds

me of my perpetually deferred dissertation. I could only experience higher education as a cult, because I

approached it as an earnest devotee of the most irresistible cult of personality out there, the narcissistic

cult of myself.

Despite Horning’s reliance on Webster’s work, which is filled with a wicked type of Nietzschean ressentiment, it

reads to me like Horning’s reliance upon it is more a testament to how comp-lit departments attempt to bring in

theory to their courses. I don’t think Horning ever took a philosophy course on Lacan. In my studies of Lacan,

I have been fortunate enough to learn him from people who wish to isolate his theory and understand it in-and-

of-itself. I have also been in art and comp-lit seminars that messily refer to ideas that aren’t given the time to be

fully fleshed out in order to understand, so I definitely know how that feels.

But the truth of the matter, as I see it, is that the work of theory is valuable. There is an inherent value in

working through a thinker and in spending great amount of time with a text, despite the feeling of drowning in a

sea of jargon and complexity. How might we ever rise to the surface and begin to articulate an insight clearly if

we haven’t given this time?

Horning’s blog does tap into much of the problems that many people of our generation have when it comes to

theory more generally. This is a phenomenon that has even seeped into the structure of the postmodern novel.

In n +1′s essay, The Theory Generation, we find an even more compelling description of the way that theory

has functioned as a parasite for our generation’s ability to implement thought towards progressive social change,

or to even put theory to productive use. Our failure to operationalize, and let alone, make theory even practical

has in part been caused by something very natural: nostalgia. Why is it that 1970′s France becomes a sort of

idyllic paradise of true social revolution? I would submit that there is a bona fide reason for this nostalgia, and

that it is instructive, albeit sad.

The fetishization of May 68′ exists because we relate to it as something that is just a little too distant to our

imaginary to fully understand, but just proximal enough to loosely apply to today’s times. The France of Lacan,

Deleuze, and Derrida is a time in which new structures took to the streets, a time in which we are given a certain

type of equipment that we have never been able to appropriate towards today’s struggles. What’s the problem

with this precisely? The truth is that there is still much to learn from it, and lest we remain a-historic, we should

understand France of the 60′s and 70′s, because as Alain Badiou claims, it was the last time something of a

renaissance in the west took place.

Back to the novel, many protagonists are now often caught in a sort of tragic deadlock in being able to

appropriate a relation to theory. I am reminded, in Horning’s argument, of the conflict that plagued

the protagonist of The Corrections, an otherwise wonderful novel. The protagonist of the novel is a college

professor at a small college in the midwest and he is totally tragic because – in part – how he relates to theory.

Nicholas Dames writes of how theory has corrupted protagonists in postmodern novels:

It is as if the too-human frailty of these characters means that they fall short of the demands of Theory  — a

cunningly ironic demonstration (of a kind familiar from the entire history of realist fiction) that these

demands might fall short of human needs.

The protagonist in The Corrections prides himself as a Foucault expert, and publicly speaks of his love of

Habermas, the thinker that Franzen puts forward as more clear, and more cogent, as full of more use-value. He

has never read any Habermas and as Franzen points out, he doesn’t read him because he is too clear.

The protagonist much preferred remaining in the clouded world of Foucault’s esotericism. This was a safe

world where no one could touch him. The argument goes that this position is emblematic of our generation’s

relation to obscure theory. We create a safe world where no one can touch us. Franzen, like Horning, seems to

prefer theory that is loaded with some positive use-value. The right kind of theory is that which gives the reader

a straight path to analyzing social phenomena and that escapes jargon.

But isn’t this just as much a fetishization of theory? The desire to work with more difficult thinkers exists and is

real for a very good reason. I don’t want to live in the Anglo-American pragmatist tradition, or Habermas’

liberal speech acts and Kantian-Rawlsian thought experiments. Yes, I do believe that this type of theory is a large

part of what is wrong about the world and how we come to understand what society should be. If that isn’t a

battle worth fighting for in theory, I don’t know what is. The structuralism and post-structuralism of French

thought does not have to be superfluous and tragic. There is a simple and compelling reason why these schools

of thought are clinged to by our generation: they are more interesting.

They are difficult and thus they are more rewarding. I would even posit that if someone finds great pleasure with

the inside intricacies of a theory and lacks the ability to articulate that theory in language that cannot

be understood by someone who has never read any of it, that is their problem, not the theories fault.

If theory is that which cripples the subject in the postmodern novel, ergo, in real life, should we simply abandon

it for a world of pragmatic clarity? All forays into theory begin with facing an impossible chasm filled with

nostalgia, frailty and irony. Isn’t this part of the desire that situates our generation?

I’d much prefer sticking with theory and finding a way to traverse these shortcomings instead of reacting to its

inadequacies by denying theories own potential. It is our lack of ability to operationalize theory in any coherent

manner that is to blame, not the various schools of thought to which we ascribe.

The battle that involves making theory more accessible and less enclosed into its own cave, is a battle worth

remaining faithful to, and for that matter, I think there are countless examples of thinkers that have made

accessible the more difficult work of Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida. I know many of them in the flesh, in some

cases, I am happy to call them my friends.

http://danieltutt.com/2012/12/05/in-defense-of-theory/

Literalab Central European Literary Life Michael Stein 01/11/2012

The _____ generation: on American novelists and theory

“Why don’t you all f-fade away

And don’t try to dig what we all s-s-say

I’m not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation

I’m just talkin’ ’bout my g-g-g-generation”

- The Who, “My Generation”

n+1 magazine has an assessment of the influence of critical theory on American novelists who came of age in the

80s, which happens to be my g-g-g-generation, and though I can’t say I’ve read many of the novels discussed –

only The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, with failed attempts at a couple of the others – the article brings up some

interesting issues and, I think, also misses some even more significant ones.

It’s main idea: “Theory, it turns out, might be most interesting not when it changes the form of fiction, but when

it becomes an uneasy part of fiction’s content.” This accompanies the sense that for most, if not all, of these

writers and the generation they represent, there was something superficial in the experience of this Theory,

something that didn’t quite stick.

Nicholas Dames, the article’s author, picks up Sam Lipsyte’s memorable summation of Theory from The Ask:

“It wasn’t bullshit, I remember thinking at the time. It just wasn’t not bullshit.” But I think that all this might have

much less to do with the writers of this potential theoretical bullshit than with its readers.

At a conference on exiled intellectuals held in Prague in 2011, I interviewed a scholar from Bard, David Kettler,

who spoke about intellectuals crossing the Atlantic from one cultural context to another and the problems this

can lead to, in this case, for the post-structuralists who came to the U.S. in the 1980s:

“But they had read the whole history of philosophy and supposed their readers already knew all that. But then

they bring it to America, and it becomes a whole different construct because you’re reading the same people but

you don’t know Kant, whereas every French or German student at that level will have read Kant by then.”

I would go one step further and say that there were literature students I knew then who were not only not well-

read but who saw Theory as a means to avoid poring through so many fat, time-consuming, tomes no longer

relevant now that the “author was dead.” For them reading Theory was a conveniently intellectual form of

CliffsNotes.

The Gap in the Story

The problem with a lot of the sweeping narratives about the modern novel published in American magazines is

that there tends to be blind spot of massive proportions, one that is all the more glaring for being the same spot

in virtually every similar article. This piece stays true to form and tells a story that goes like this:

Europeans used to write novels. Their names were Balzac, Flaubert, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Zola, Henry James,

Kafka, Joyce and Mann. Their broad and varied influence can be seen in novels being written today. Novels are

being written in the 21st century by American and some other English-language writers such as Jonathan Franzen,

Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Eugenides, etc.

In this article these novelists have been influenced by theorists from a land seemingly without novelists of their

own (maybe that’s why they came to the US in the first place?) The only non-English language novelists

mentioned here that encroach on contemporary existence are three French practitioners of the nouveau roman.

As for all the writers that might offer a more nuanced picture of the dichotomy set up in the article between

Theory depicted as a subject in American realist novels and Anglo-American avant-garde novels that “seemed

intent on adding the torque of Theory to their own narrative twists (from DeLillo to late Pynchon, Winterson,

Foster Wallace, Tom McCarthy, et alia)” they are nowhere to be found, having fallen into a void. It’s almost as if

all the modern Russian, German, Latin American and Asian writers, who ironically can’t easily be fit into these

categories, not to mention those created by the Zadie Smiths of the world, these writers are simply and

conveniently ignored.

I realize it’s impossible to incorporate all of modern literary history and the whole

globe into a single article, but whether it’s about literary theory or the evil (or virtue)

of MFAs, when you cordon off the English-language literary world you present

yourself with same basic risks. If you’re writing about publishing and money you’re

probably safe. But if you’re bringing in names like Foucault and Derrida and the

intellectual currents they were a part of and you pull them that far out of context that

the continents they came from culturally cease to exist then there is vital part of the

story missing.

“I belong to the blank generation and

I can take it or leave it each time

I belong to the ______ generation but

I can take it or leave it each time”

- Richard Hell and The Voidoids, “Blank Generation”

Photo – 1) Michel Foucault by Randolph Badler. On the blackboard it says that section 1 & 5 rewrites were due

Oct. 31, which was yesterday as of this posting, so if you didn’t hand them in then you’re too late. 2) Richard

Hell.

http://literalab.com/2012/11/01/the-_____-generation-on-american-novelists-and-theory/

TThheeoollooggyy SS ttuudd iioo

TThheeoollooggyy aanndd tthhee TThheeoorryy GG eenneerraa tt iioonn

published by tony.baker

Mon, 09/03/2012 - 06:16

Over the summer I pulled a copy of the journal n+1 off the shelf at Barnes and

Noble (and read it while pacing the store with a baby Moby-wrapped to my

chest, cause that’s how I rolled this summer). The article that caught my eye

was Nicholas Dames’s “Theory and the Novel.” It turned out to be one of

those rare pieces of writing that span not only the significant gap between

scholarly and popular, but also that much wider chasm between insight and

humor.

Dames opens with a kind of diagnostic offering. Have you ever been invited

over to the home of a new acquaintance, and spotted on her bookshelves all-

too familiar artifacts of a graying education in literary theory? “That copy

of The Foucault Reader with the master’s bald head and piercing eyes,

emblematic of pure intellection; A Thousand Plateaus with its Escher-lite line-

drawing promising the thrills of disorientation; the stark, sickly-gray spine of

Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. . .” Do you turn to your guest, and see in her

face a mix of guilt and embarrassment, as if saying, College, you know. And

please don’t ask me about them, because I can’t even remember which ones I

managed to read. Do you give your host a knowing, sympathetic nod?

This is the plight of the theory generation. Educated in English departments between 1980 and 2000 or so,

these graduates consumed a steady diet of literary and critical theory. And whereas in those early years these

texts came as a radical challenge to notions of narrative, power, gender, person, etc, it wasn’t long before theory

rhetoric became the new orthodoxy. The litany of Continental authorship was as essential to the interview for a

tenure-track position in lit-crit as the funky black glasses and the thin tie or opal scarf.

Despite the jabs, the author is not at all dismissive of Adorno, et al. Rather, he is critical of the way the discipline

pandered to and molded itself around them. And he notes that the winds are changing. A group of new novels

are returning to grand, coherent narratives of realistic fiction—a form that theory claimed to have killed off years

ago. Novels like Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, to name

two (the article is in fact a review of six such novels), are doing what theory once taught us was no longer doable.

More importantly, though, the authors of these new novels are consciously engaging in implicit arguments with

the theory texts—or, more accurately, the English departments from which they graduated, and the

fundamentalist attitudes toward Of Grammatology and The Order of Things. This conscious debate sometimes

makes it to the surface of the narrative, as in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, when Chip Lambert sells off

his whole collection of theory in order to impress his girlfriend with expensive dinners. Franzen is careful to

name the authors he sells off, as well as their total worth—which turns out to be $115. The point, at least in

Dames’s reading, is a satisfyingly clever one, equal parts philosophical and practical: Franzen needs to move his

narrative forward in traceable, coherent, realistic fashion—he needs, that is, his character to hatch a plot to raise

the money. To do so, he comes up with a plot that both allows Lambert to get what he wants, and allows

Franzen to challenge the notion that literature has no use any longer for traceable, coherent, realistic plot

movement. Thus Franzen and co. are going where an earlier generation dared not go: challenging the

radicalism of theory in order to construct new, post-post-critical novels.

Now as a theologian trained in a good bit of theory, I left my reading that day with two insights that may seem—

but are not, I think—at odds with one another. First, it was refreshing to hear that the days of unquestioning

allegiance to this family of French and German criticism are ending in English departments. While theology is

in many ways a much more varied discipline, there is certainly a visible stream within it that has considered the

writings of Foucault, etc., to be sacra pagina, even at times allowing these texts to stand in for pre-critical scripture

and the writings of the Fathers as the new revealed texts. Some still popular schools of secular theology, having

given up the notion that theology serves the church, tend to assume that theologians ought to craft their accounts

of God in light of the latest bulletin from the Sorbonne. And if this academic orthodoxy is losing ground in

English departments, then theology—which so often comes late to the trends in the humanities—will soon “catch

up.” This was my first response.

On the other hand, though, the aging of theory may present

theologians with an opportunity to do something they could

not do, or could not very easily do, when theory was all the

rage. We can continue to read Greenblatt and Deleuze for

the insights they provide for theological analysis, rather than

because they’re terribly important and of the moment. In

my own work, for instance, I am trying to think through an

account of revelation according to which God encounters

creation not with a violent rupture, but in a mode of

engagement that is intimate with our culture, history, and

memory, even as it remains a supernatural gift. Foucault,

Deleuze, Zizek and Badiou, among others, have been a real

help in thinking toward something like this, and I suspect

they will continue to be, even when, as is inevitable, “no one

reads Foucault anymore…”

And this may be the reason that theory will live on in theology as it cannot in the other humanities departments.

Ironically enough, there is an orthodoxy that dominates the mood and syllabi of these arts and humanities that

cannot (or ought not) really take hold in theology. A Melville scholar must adapt her arguments to the current

mood of the Melville industry; a theologian cannot ignore current conversations, but still answers something that

evades trends. Our role is not to bring Saint Paul and Gregory of Nyssa into conversation with whatever is hot in

Europe, but rather to illuminate Paul and Gregory in a way that will serve the church. And so if it is a mistake to

sell all that we have in order to buy up the field wherein the treasures of theory are buried, it is also a mistake—or

at least an unnecessary step—to sell off our libraries of theory so that we can go on being theologians. Franzen’s

character—perhaps Franzen himself—must do this so that he can escape the hold that dogmatic theory has on

him. But theologians have, I hope, never pledged allegiance to any methodology or school of thought, so there’s

no excess of baggage to sell off so that we can go on doing our work.

So, if brave new novelists are challenging the lingua franca of critical theory with their plots and character

constructions, perhaps young theologians can turn to, for instance, Difference and Repetition as a mid-twentieth

century text that once challenged the stability of the familiar and can continue providing (ironically enough)

suggestive analogues for our theological constructions, rather than as a contemporary mapping of the ontological

terrain which one should imitate in structure or (God help us) in style. These texts may not be hot any longer,

and they may not be "correct" in whatever sense we once took them to be. And that fact alone will allow us to

make free and liberal use of them.

Anthony D. Baker

Anthony is a theology professor at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas, and a co-founder of The Theology Studio.

http://theologystudio.org/content/theology-and-the-theory-generation