Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson
faddish, some of their advocates have been. We need to admit this despite the tendency to overreact in defending ourselves against those who burlesque the theory revolution, from Walter Jackson Bate to David Perkins.2 It is time to ask what theory has and has not done for us, indeed time to ask more of it than we have to date.
In 1970s English departments, questions about the usefulness of theory typically devolved into demonstrations that different theoretical perspectives could be productively adapted to the close reading of literary texts. But as theory placed ever more pressure on the produced, consensual, libidinal, or political nature of signification, texts themselves began to become increasingly indeterminate phenomena. More traditional scholars were often anxious about this, though others took pains to reassure them that the task of interpretation was in no way jeopardized by its potentially infinite character. As Paul de Man was fond of saying in the early days of deconstruction, when some thought such an unstable or conflicted view of meaning would momentarily bring the sky down over their heads, “but it does not block discourse.” In other words, far from inhibiting interpretation—the universal business of the humanities—deconstruction, like other bodies of theory, would actually open more opportunities for interpretation. Thus, in what may seem a curious paradox to those in other disciplines, academics in English have come to accept (in practice if not openly) that the meaning of a literary text is, as it were, wholly up for grabs, while the sacred character of the text itself is indisputable. In this dynamic, I would argue, it has never been the sacredness of the text that has been at issue. The literary text is defended so as to distract attention from the real object to be protected—the profession of literary studies.
There is nothing necessarily illicit about the use of deconstruction (or most other bodies of theory) for various kinds of immanent textual analysis. With the rise of cultural studies, to be sure, as I shall suggest in chapter 4, immanent textual analysis appropriately became suspect. Until then, the key problem with the interpretation of individual texts arose when a depoliticized and radically decontextualized version of immanent analysis became a transcendent moral value, as often happens in English studies. When Derrida, for example, practices close textual analysis, the status of the text as an object of veneration or doubt is always open to question. Moreover, he generally reads individual texts to raise larger critical and social issues. Following Derrida, we may, then, analyze a literary narrative so as to address the issue of the general social demand that we narrate our subjectivity. However, under the leadership of what was once the Yale school, deconstruction in America restored the text to a venerated position and militantly dropped any consideration of larger social questions. Textual contradictions became merely rhetorical occasions for ecstasy or despair.
In this respect, though, literary deconstruction was merely following the pattern of other bodies of theory in the United States. Most bodies of theory, in fact, have characteristically compromised their claims to self-reflection and social or professional criticism in order to gain a place in the modern academic establishment. In other words, the object of interpretation and the content of interpretive discourse are considered appropriate subjects for discussion and scrutiny, but the interests of the interpreter and the discipline and society he or she serves are not. This restriction has produced a number of contradictory, almost schizophrenic, theoretical practices: until recently, psychoanalytic critics have typically been unable to examine either how their own interpretive activity or the aims and assumptions of their academic disciplines are libidinally determined; Marxist critics have frequently been reluctant or unable to analyze how their own projects are historically positioned and produced; and American deconstructive critics rarely examine the logic of their disciplines with the same rigor that they apply to constitutive contradictions in literary texts.
Lest this observation seem to score a distinctive blow against such contemporary theory, let me state clearly that in this respect most theorists behave like almost everyone else. They do not challenge the territorialization of university intellectual activity or in any way risk undermining the status and core beliefs of their fields. The difference, for theorists, is that this blindness or reluctance often contradicts the intellectual imperatives of the very theories they espouse. Indeed, only a theorized discipline can be an effective site for a general social critique—that is, a discipline actively engaged in self-criticism, a discipline that is a locus for struggle, a discipline that renews and revises its awareness of its history, a discipline that inquires into its differential relations with other academic fields, and a discipline that examines its place in the social formation and is willing to adapt its writing practices to suit different social functions.
To make these claims, to be sure, is to recognize that the conditions blocking this kind of inquiry are beginning to change. Indeed I would not be empowered to see the institutionalized blindness of theory within academic departments if the discipline of literary studies were not already somewhat open to this kind of self-criticism. As a discipline, perhaps we should now call on the example of the 1960s, when we were at least willing to interrupt the transmission of the canon of English literature to talk about the Vietnam War. If the general 1960s politicization of the university did not produce a real theorizing of academic disciplines, it did place the university’s social responsibilities on the academic agenda. Feminism has done so as well at moments, and Afro-American studies has repeatedly attempted to do so against resistance.
Yet neither feminism nor Afro-American studies is now well positioned to initiate a general critique of academia’s social mission. Both have been partly isolated by being institutionalized within separate programs. But that is not an insurmountable difficulty and indeed being outside traditional disciplines has an advantage for critique. The more serious problems include some that are internal. In two versions, cultural feminism and Afro-centrism, these movements have fallen under the spell of American exceptionalism and mounted fantasmatic claims to unique redemptive powers. This has made them intolerant of differences of opinion within their own ranks and thus ill suited for dialogue with other versions of feminism and Afro-American studies, let alone other bodies of theory. For these and other reasons, some of which I will note shortly, both bodies of theory have failed to realize their potential for a thoroughgoing analysis of academia’s place in society.
Of course there have been at least isolated instances of serious and theoretically grounded disciplinary critique for some time, beginning with Richard Ohmann’s English in America: A Radical View of the Profession (1976), but the more general phenomenon is more recent. Here one would begin by citing the publications of GRIP (the Group for Research on the Institutionalization and Professionalization of Literary Study) in this country and such British works as Chris Baldick’s The Social Mission of English Criticism (1983); Terry Eagleton’s The Function of Criticism (1984); and Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke, and Chris Weedon’s Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class (1985). More recently, Evan Watkins, Gerald Graff, Terry Caesar, James Sosnoski, John Guillory, and others have begun to rethink the discipline’s history and practices. This shift in emphasis, moreover, has real, not merely imagined, risks for the existing infrastructure of universities, even for their economy. As we shall see more specifically in the last four essays in Manifesto, when theory casts its gaze on departments and universities as we know them, they can be shown partly to inhibit intellectual work and even to function as reactionary forces within the larger society.
It is apparent that both disciplinary critique and a larger critique of academia—enterprises that I believe to be the inescapable destiny of the logic of theory, though not necessarily the inevitable direction of its social practice—will produce both stress within departments and a certain backlash against theory. That seems to be one underlying cause for statements like Stanley Fish’s “theory’s day is dying,” a statement that may reflect Fish’s continuing resistance—from the 1980s through his 1995 Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change—to the more politically and socially self-critical turn to recent theory and to the new willingness to view the profession of literary studies with some distance. For Fish’s earlier work had largely emptied the text of any intrinsic meaning and instead sacralized the profession of literary studies as the guarantor of consensus and the source of a humanistic tradition. As the attention of theory began at least marginally to shift from how to interpret literature to how the discipline