…these philosophies have their perverse charms. If you look at it in the right way, it’s liberating that, as Derrida believes, there is no experience that precedes language, or that poems, as de Man says, are just persistant namings of the void, or that knowledge, as Foucault argues, is a function of a diffuse and vaguely malevolent ‘power.’… From the point of view of an english major, it was intoxicating because it promised to replace art. Why was that attractive? I think because I was impatient. Art was messy and small, reeking of lies and mistakes and humanity. Theory was clean and huge, like a memory, like heaven. Theory was power. Theory was war. And theory exalted the critic. No longer was I a lowly grad student parasite clinging desperately to Joyce’s belly fur; now I was a carnivore, hunting down the text and killing it. It was kind of like making art yourself, except you didn’t.
Gary Kamiya, quoted by Little Potato. I am hostile towards theory for many reasons, not least being its unintelligibility and its falsity, but I think this precisely exposes what is worst about it: it exists as a means for the suppression of the artist by those who claim to love art.
Indeed, I think most theory serves this role: masses of gnostic, oppressive, symmetrical, self-referential language smothering whatever natural and human life exists beneath it. Political theory: a means of subordinating the individual to the striking diagrams of some universal set of ideas and logic. Literary theory: a means for denying the import of the author (through the absurd ‘intentional fallacy’) and establishing narcissistic “readings” of “texts” that “explode” meanings and position the tracer of lexical lines as some kind of creator. Explode is a nicely violent word for it, too.
The very clever resent art just as we resent the world; we want to control it, reduce it, bring it to heel with our fine phrases and semicolons and footnotes. Thus we must establish that art isn’t what it claims to be but some secret cipher only we can decode, a hidden message about the sexual anguish of the painter or the unreconstructed bourgeosie sentimentality of the composer or the imperialism of the poet; just as we say to the world: you’re not really happy, with your false consciousnesses!
“Theory was clean and huge, like a memory, like heaven. Theory was power. Theory was war. And theory exalted the critic.” When reading Chomsky’s infamous assessment of literary theory -that it is all idiotic- one might wonder: how did it come to dominate our intellectual landscape? I agree with Kamiya: what exalts will win favor, and in a world dense with people eager to be involved with art but, unfortunately and undemocratically, without talent, there existed this need: to justify the labors of the academic and critical class.
Now we have an unending rain of essays on how Kafka’s Odradek is about sodomy and need of an army of graduate students to parse and respond to them in their own jargon. This is part of the academic-industrial complex! Complexity of language is their technique for obscuring how little is really being said, and I think many of the participants can even recognize how astray we’ve gone; but just as with the military-industrial complex, there are forces at work here that none can contain: ego, pride, student loan debt, etc.
(via mills)
This is a rough thing to see first thing in the morning. I spent my years in grad school as one of these demonized theorists doing everything in my power to place art as a fundamentally necessary, mutative, generative force in the world - it was the language I used to teach and justify the ridiculous love I had for art and aesthetic experience.
