The Excitement of the Stuff

In the later decades​ of the last century, a new wave of ideas broke across the study of literature throughout the world. Known simply as ‘theory’, it ranged from structuralism to feminism, semiotics to hermeneutics, Marxism to deconstruction. All this was formidably abstract stuff, but it managed to be sexy as well. Its intellectual ambitiousness, along with its readiness to raise fundamental questions, attracted some of the most talented students of the day. It also gave birth to a cluster of international superstars – Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Umberto Eco – who were sometimes to be found lecturing in Sicily or Slovenia when they should have been teaching a class in New Jersey. At once prestigious and contentious, prized and reviled, theory was a way of amassing cultural capital for oneself as well as a source of genuinely exciting insights. Guileless souls content simply to read Jane Eyre now languished in the outer darkness, while their more glamorous colleagues, hotfoot from Paris or New Haven, brought the resources of narratology or postcolonial studies to bear on the novel.

Where did this current spring from? Since three of Derrida’s major works appeared in 1967, an obvious answer would be the political turmoil of the late 1960s, in which – unusually for such mass protests – the function of academic knowledge and the fate of the humanities were among the issues at stake. For the most part, however, theory flourished in the years after les événements in Paris and elsewhere. Much of it was a way of keeping the revolution warm in the realm of ideas, or displacing it into some other subversive project. Radical politics were flushed off the streets of Saint-Germain and set up home instead in psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. It’s true that the socialist left remained on the front foot in the early 1970s, while feminism has flourished well beyond that date. This is largely because there were pressing political questions for it to address, which was not true of deconstruction or phenomenology. By and large, however, action – baffled by a form of power which had proved too strong for it – yielded to discourse. Indeed, theory was a kind of meta-discourse, language about language, and thus at two removes from tearing up the cobblestones.

Yet if that was all it was, it would be hard to know why disputes over literary theory left so much blood on the senior common room floor, some of it looking alarmingly like my own. Why was Derrida’s nomination for an honorary degree at Cambridge vetoed by dons who probably hadn’t read more than a few pages of his work, but had heard High Table gossip that he believed anything could mean anything else? Not because theory proposed new ways of reading, which nobody thought a particularly big deal, but because it represented an assault on the conventional idea of the humanities. That whole field was in any case wracked by crisis, uncertain of its identity in advanced capitalist regimes which seemed to deny it much value other than the decorative or therapeutic. The student movement of the late 1960s was among other things a prophetic critique of today’s brutally philistine universities, self-avowed service stations for the capitalist economy.

If some theory had revolutionary implications, it was because it pressed that soulless logic through to the humanities themselves. They were no longer to be seen as a preserve of personal value and spiritual insight in a crassly utilitarian world. On the contrary, you could take a work of art and show how it was governed by certain underlying codes and systems, deep narrative structures, ideological interests or the play of unconscious forces, of which the work itself was innocently unaware. The elusive spirit of the human could be reduced to the product of impersonal forces. What an otherwise diverse body of theories had in common was their anti-empiricism – the conviction that the truth of a literary work was not the way it spontaneously appeared. What you saw was not what you got. And since Britain was the homeland of empiricism, theory had mostly to be imported from abroad, just as the country had imported most of its modernist writers some decades earlier.

For the liberal humanists who presided over literary studies, literature was the home of the intimate and irreducible, the stray gesture and sensuous particular, of everything that held out against a world of bureaucratic states and transnational corporations. The phrase ‘literary theory’ seemed a contradiction in terms: how could one deal abstractly with the tone or mood or texture of a poem? Literature was the last refuge of personal experience and the individual spirit, as well as a form of creative transcendence that had long since stood in for a failed religion. If all this were to be unmasked as an effect of the signifier or the ruses of desire, there really was nowhere else to turn. The theorists had laid their grubby paws not just on film and fiction but on the inner sanctum of subjectivity itself. The barbarian had breached the citadel, armed with little more than an essay by Claude Lévi-Strauss or a bluffer’s guide to Jacques Lacan.

If theory was hard to argue with, it was partly because it pre-empted its critics by including a kind of anti-theory within itself. Theory didn’t believe that thought was fundamental. It was suspicious of its own strategies. As Lacan put it in a parody of Descartes, ‘I think where I am not, and I am not where I think.’ Delve beneath thought and what you uncovered were psychical forces, material interests, networks of power. If Marx was the philosopher of the day, Nietzsche was almost as influential. Theory, or at least some of it, was intent on undermining itself, and the key word for this was deconstruction. Propositions could always be shown to come apart at the seams if you pressed them hard enough. A new attention to ambiguity and indeterminacy proved particularly attractive to women theorists, struggling to gain a foothold in a field of young men anxiously comparing the length of their sentences.

Fredric Jameson’s sentences could be of Proustian length, great intricate chains of syntax that pursue their stately course in no hurry to arrive at a full stop; but his prose was never deliberately obscure, as it is with those theorists who make their arguments irrefutable by rendering them unintelligible. Obscurantism is as much the product of anxiety as it is of arrogance. In fact, The Years of Theory, his final book, is one of the most accessible Jameson ever produced. It is the transcript of a series of seminars he gave in the US three years ago and instead of his usual burnished rhetoric, magisterial if somewhat monotone, we have the speaking voice of a more unbuttoned, self-deprecating Jameson, a man who was clearly at ease with his audience and attentive to them (‘Don’t worry about that right now’; ‘I think you’re probably not going to … read through that, and I don’t think it’s even necessary’; ‘I would like you to feel the excitement of the stuff’). The tone is democratic American, very different from that of the French divas of both genders whose thought he expounds. There are touches of wry humour: Lévi-Strauss ‘is obviously an enormously brilliant figure who, like a lot of such people, is absolutely untrustworthy’. Unlike the gurus of the Left Bank, he didn’t regard it as beneath his dignity to explain some basic ideas: patriarchy, for example, or the fact that Freud has no real concept of the mother. When it comes to affairs of the mind, at least in the cultural domain, the United States is a colony of Europe, and the style of this book reflects the fact. There are even some snatches of gossip and odd bits of biography. The young Lacan met James Joyce and may have psychoanalysed Picasso. He was also consulted by Sartre, who happened to be having hallucinations at the time. We learn that Foucault and Derrida couldn’t stand each other, rather as one imagines Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver don’t get on too well. Derrida was the only member of the intelligentsia to visit his fellow Algerian Louis Althusser when he was locked up for killing his wife. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, doyens of the Frankfurt School, were avid consumers of Marx Brothers movies. There is even a reference to Sartre’s squint, as well as to the fact that Jameson himself had a tendency to put on weight. This is not the kind of stuff one would have heard at Lacan’s renowned seminars in Paris, voguish as well as highbrow affairs, like a cross between academia and Ascot.

The book pushes the years of French theory back to the aftermath of the Second World War (Sartre, Beauvoir, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon, Merleau-Ponty) and in doing so weaves a personal biography into its intellectual history. Jameson’s first book was on Sartre; he regarded himself as a ‘more-than-former-Sartrean’ and was inclined to overrate Being and Nothingness, which along with The Age of Reason was Jameson’s first introduction to the theory business. In fact, he tells us that he always tried to remain faithful to existentialism, which is almost as surprising as being told that he always remained loyal to the Buddha. It is hard to see any evidence of this commitment in his voluminous writings.

The commentary on Simone de Beauvoir is not done particularly well, but it is surprising that it is done at all. Jameson was shy of sexuality in his writing, but addresses it more directly here than anywhere else (there are also accounts of the feminist philosophers Monique Wittig, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray). Film theory, one of his long-standing passions, is thrown into the mix, with Jean-Luc Godard praised as at least as great a figure as any of the period’s thinkers. We are speaking of a cultural era which is sometimes compared to ancient Greece and Enlightenment Germany. Roughly speaking, it shifts from the human subject as a free, self-fashioning agent (existentialism) to the subject as an effect of forces beyond its grasp (structuralism, psychoanalysis). Or, in a different idiom, from the Liberation to neoliberalism. We begin by speaking of the world and end up being spoken by it.

Later chapters of the book cover Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Lacan, Derrida, Althusser, Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and others, in what feels like a constant race against time. Given the limited duration of the seminar, each of these thinkers, some of them notoriously esoteric, must be encapsulated in fewer than twenty pages. The result, inevitably, is a sense of scrappiness and excessive haste – of sudden cul-de-sacs, connections not quite forged or major topics unaccountably neglected. There are patches of dishevelled thought and a host of untied threads. All of these casualties of the book’s form are well worth putting up with, however, given the wealth of insight it yields. Theory is sometimes treated as though it was self-begetting, but as a materialist, Jameson was alert to its historical origins and outworks – to the journals, groups, schisms, personalities, seismic events and tides of political thought of postwar France, of which he had an encyclopedic knowledge. There is a heavy industry of commentaries on Lacan, for example, but not many of them point out that the students who flocked to his seminars were mostly Maoists.

Jameson’s knowledge wasn’t confined to a single nation. One suspects that nobody alive today has read as many books as he had, from Heraclitus and Parmenides to obscure texts and tracts only he had heard of. This urge for totality has its drawbacks. Jameson was always too generous-spirited a thinker, holding with the Hegel he admired that the truth lies in the whole, and that one must judge ideas in this context rather than dismissing them out of hand. There may be an American impulse to affirm at work here, in contrast to the negativity which marks French thought from Mallarmé’s aesthetics and Sartre’s nothingness to Derrida’s différance and Alain Badiou’s ineffable Event. Jameson tells us that he adheres provisionally to all the theoretical cases he outlines, which ignores not only the flagrant contradictions between them but the incompatibility of some of them with his own Marxist politics. It is an approach more typical of the lecture room than the political rally. For Marx, by contrast, not to mention the ferociously partisan Jesus, the truth is not a totality but one-sided. It is a scandal and stumbling block, a cutting sword which seeks to lay bare falsehood and deceit in the name of human emancipation.

Jameson praises Deleuze as ‘one of the most marvellous thinkers of the 20th century’, while going on to claim that he turns all the thinkers he deals with into himself. That doesn’t seem all that marvellous to me, any more than there’s much to admire about the squalid idealising of schizophrenia to which his work gave rise. It isn’t really possible to derive an ethics from Deleuze’s grandiose philosophy of desire, or for that matter a feasible politics. Jameson was silent on these questions, seeking as usual to understand rather than censure. One mustn’t lapse into a simplistic opposition between good and evil, which would be ripe for deconstruction. But you don’t need to wax metaphysical to denounce Donald Trump. It’s rather that denunciation wasn’t his style, any more than satire or parody was. He was one of the least polemical of left-wing writers.

Cultural theorists like Jameson are a reinvention of the classical intellectual. Intellectuals differ from academics in ranging across a number of disciplines, but also in bringing ideas to bear on society as a whole. They are typically both polymaths and polyglots. Jameson was fluent in several languages and had a voracious appetite for knowledge. He was as learned in Czech science fiction as he was in Taiwanese cinema. He continued to produce major works until his death last month at the age of ninety. His exceptional range of interests pointed to the way an otherwise socially pointless literary criticism might manage to justify its existence. By becoming a form of cultural critique, it can play a modest role in changing the world as well as interpreting it.

Much like his English counterpart Perry Anderson, another master of languages who can move from aesthetics to political theory to realpolitik in the course of an essay, Jameson seemed like a survival from a more erudite age before the rise of modern academia, with its jealously guarded specialisms. But his extraordinary intellectual reach was also a product of the present. Theory represented a new configuration of knowledge, appropriate to an age in which the boundaries between traditional academic subjects were crumbling and most of the exciting work was being done in the borderlands between them. Literary criticism had been tightly focused on the isolated text, in a defence of high culture against a barbarian world, but was now flung open to a much wider field of inquiry. Jameson’s academic field was literature, but there is little about poets and novelists in The Years of Theory compared with philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis and so on. The book is thus likely to confirm the prejudice that theory supplants the literary work rather than enriches it. In fact, it confirms the view that criticism can flourish only by reaching beyond its traditional confines, losing one kind of identity in order to discover another.

Where Jameson differed most from the classical intellectual is in his lack of a vigorous public presence. George Eliot and John Stuart Mill moved in what could still be called a public sphere, which is less true of their modern counterparts. It was true, however, of the public seminars of the Parisian masters in the 1960s and 1970s, which were social events as well as arenas of learning. Lacan’s seminar was the most illustrious, but Deleuze could attract hordes of ardent supporters, and there were a number of more modest projects. Taken together, and with all due allowance for the posing and preening, they represent a remarkable interlocking of social and intellectual life, one which the modern Anglophone world has never been able to match. Today’s academics find it hard enough to entice enrolled students onto their courses, let alone cajole the general public.

If theory sent out such shock waves, whatever happened to it? Where are the troops of Marxist critics of the 1970s, or the flock of devout Derrideans of the 1980s? The simple answer is that it’s only so long one can keep the revolution warm in spirit. As the realisation gradually dawned that it wasn’t going to happen in reality, the era of Harold Bloom and Hélène Cixous gave way to postmodernism, a streetwise culture for which theory is altogether too mandarin an affair. Postmodernists have no great relish for abstractions, think pragmatically rather than historically and are obsessed by sexuality but indifferent to socialism. They are more interested in transgression than transformation. Theory was among other things the brief afterlife of a failed insurrection. Its decline was bound up with what Jameson calls the de-Marxification of France, as the Althusserians gave way to the nouveaux philosophes. But it was also the most exhilarating thing to happen to literary studies since the days of F.R. Leavis, and a good many of its insights are destined to endure.