Resistance is futile

Resistance is futile but not for the usual reasons. The old Marxist model saw avant-garde culture as the last holdout against an all consuming culture industry. Back then it seemed that talent scouts were about searching for the newest art in order to incorporate it into mainstream entertainment. Now there is no such tension. Avoiding appropriation is easy, no one in Hollywood is paying attention anyway. Political critiques of entertainment are shrugged off as irrelevant, queer readings are welcomed.

What does this mean for academic criticism? While it once seemed surprising to apply the critical tools of academic commentary to popular entertainment, this sort of cultural studies hardly seems challenging anymore. It is so easy to make a critical political reading of a contemporary film that even the most ardent old school leftist must suspect something. The culture industry does not worry that critics will unveil the neo-liberal message implicit in children's cartoons. The screenwriters worked hard to put it there, they're flattered some professor noticed.

Increasingly the purpose of cultural criticism is to show that art today can have political importance and that once upon a time it did have a social charge. History is the last refuge of criticism. "No one worries about the avant-garde anymore. But they used to seem explosive." Criticism needs to show how art could be radical, shocking, inspiring. We don't need to only use the language of the avant-garde either. This newest historicism seeks to explain the tensions in earlier historical periods, in order to make clear that it could be so once more. Romanticism was once revolutionary, in fact "revolution" used to be revolutionary--the very word has been tamed.

Academic criticism followed the path of the avant-garde in the 1970s by adopting increasingly complex and arcane procedures which separated it from ordinary culture. This specialization was less an attempt to legitimate theory by giving it a jargon than it was an attempt to insist on an academic version of aesthetic autonomy through the use of experimental writing techniques.

In the end, autonomy has brought with it dismissal and ignorance. "You can keep your autonomy" has been the attitude of such institutional voices as the New York Times. That academic writing is dismissed by the Times and so many other mainstream outlets is partially the result of the theory movement's disdain for compromised writing, its insistence on a purity of language even as it demonstrated its impossibility. The age of theory is over not just because that entire generation has died, but also because the shock value of highly complex thought has worn off. Couple that with a political culture that celebrates populist ignorance of history, grammar and logic, then you have the current gulf between the university and the rest of society. So the trick is to write sophisticated commentaries in a new manner.

BioTheory

For the last few years some of the remaining luminaries of the theory era have taken a new approach. They talk about themselves. Their lectures are accessible, filled with reminiscences about their early career.

The grandiosity, the tendency for jargon to generalize remains in the habit of these speakers to equate their own careers with “the discipline.” When Gayatri Spivak or Fred Jameson chat, they define Comparative Literature through the arc of their own professional life.

Theory has become personal in a new way, it has become identified even more intensely with the names of its protagonists, yet this latest phase of biographical theory talk, the reminiscences of what it was like back in the day, gives the strongest sense that theory ain’t what once was, maybe it just ain’t.

In the last works of Derrida and Foucault, one might feel that they are looking back, but that impression could just as easily be our projection. Do the last volumes of History of Sexuality really express Foucault’s own self-understanding? Does a work such as Who’s afraid of Philosophy? recount Derrida’s place in France’s academy?

Still there is a fundamental difference between these works and the current round of old school stories. Most members of the theory fan club, waited eagerly for personal statements from their old masters. Who did not expect Derrida to confess, American-style, what his personal feelings about the Paul de Man revelations were? It took a while for people to understand that Foucault was never going to wear the t-shirt of sexual identity.

The old guard mediated their personality through their theory. They did not break down on camera or in front of three hundred acolytes. Derrida is cagey as ever in the documentaries about him. And while this reticence to speak publicly about their personal, to say nothing of their sexual, lives may seem quaintly old fashioned, old-European, it also shows a commitment to intellectual complexity, that their writing was not just a hat worn outside the house, but a constant habit trained into their every phrase--giving us the impression that the current autobiographical inclination in theory lectures is something of a slackening.