Theory and education

There is a blurb from the Village Voice which appears on many of Slavoj Zizek's books: "...the best intellectual high since ANTI-OEDIPUS." This is reprinted in earnest, I suppose, while I think it captures two profound truths. Firstly, Zizek probably IS the most intellectually exciting and stimulating figure on the scene, to the extent that I am qualified to assent to that statement. Secondly, there is something intoxicating, something like getting "high," about reading Zizek--something that baffles straight-forward sense, something unlike normal reading, something--may I say?--addictive.

Here are the points I'll be working with (I've noticed a lot of times, my premise, not my argument, is what people disagree with).

• By "theory," I mean a usually-European, post-1960, left-leaning, esoteric set of critics who write a kind of interdisciplinary philosophy that derives usually from Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, rather than in the analytic and/or pragmatic philosophy popular in American Universities (hence you can't major in "theory" or usually study these subjects in an American philosophy department).
• Some names: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy De Bord, Maurice Blanchot, Slavoj Zizek, Paul Ricoeur, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas; and closer to home: Frederic Jameson, Paul De Man, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag.
• I don't think it is useful or necessary to include a previous generation, although one will see a lot of mentions of: Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs, Gaston Bachelard, Theodor Adorno, etc. I say, "Leave them out of this!"
• That these thinkers (Derrida, Lacan, et al.) tend to be classed indiscriminately as post-structuralist, post-modern, etc.
• That much of the reaction against and enthusiasm for these thinkers has much to do with their reputation as subversive writers, whose self-important and inaccessible prose requires much analysis to get to the point of their "abstruse theories," if they aren't just clap-trap.

This post has nothing to say about these thinkers, as such. I have read widely in the authors listed above; I like some more than others, I don't think any of them are "nonsense" or disposable; I think their contributions were among the most important intellectual contributions of the last century; and I read them for pleasure (and the pleasure of thinking).

This post is about their reception and use, which I hereby characterize as:
1) largely dillettantish
2) paying insufficient attention to the pre-history of these topics
3) stylistically damaging
4) guilty of "dumb versions" of their theories, and/ or "keywords" readings
5) pretentious and exoticizing

Largely dilettantish: It is an irony to me that the main readers of "theory" are not the expected population, grad students. While my friends and I read *heavily* in theory, in comparison to our other reading, it can only comprise a small portion of our total reading, because, after all, you can't get a PhD in the Theory Department. I think the sort of problems discussed in this post also lead to a dampening of enthusiasm for theory in more mature minds--the "high" wears off. In any case, people who stick with high-level critical thought no longer seem to be fan boys or dilettantes, but you may say they are "seriously engaged." Rather, those who seem to the biggest "fans" of theory are undergraduates and 20-somethings. As for 20-somethings, it is hard to care what they do in New York, in between their "music projects" and gentrifications, but when someone says that THOUSAND PLATEAUS is their "favorite book," it is hard not to snicker. As for undergraduates, the rest of this post will deal with them, but their dilettantism is almost built-in, since no professor is going to assign *all* of THE ORDER OF THINGS to an undergraduate class, but is far more likely to teach exemplary snippets, photocopies into a course-pack. (This is also disastrously true for Karl Marx.)

2) paying insufficient attention to the pre-history of these topics: Derrida, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre all wrote books on Edmund Husserl. Presumably 95% of undergraduate enthusiasts of Derrida have not read Husserl. I know I haven't! After I had read about seven books by Derrida, I opened a book by Heidegger and was floored by how foolish I had been to think that everything Derrida was doing (even stylistically) was new and his innovation, when even the first page of Heidegger's THE WAY TO LANGUAGE is astonishingly proto-Derridean. Not that everyone should read everything in order--but, if one reads Derrida at all, the first thing you notice is that he seems to have read everything. This, of course, would be a different kind of dilettantism, but a more desirable one: a dilettante who has read Husserl.

3) stylistically damaging: I actually wish more people wrote like Zizek and Derrida, who have completely different styles, each of which is all too easy to parody. However, wouldn't that be a
great improvement over the weirdly vocabulary-heavy, distended, humorless prose that undergraduates feel compelled to write in emulation of theory? See here for a perfect (and endlessly-generated) parody/example. [I must admit, I find it very depressing when it is assumed that I write at all in that tedious, name-dropping vein. The only paper I have ever written that involved Heidegger, Derrida, et al, was perfectly lovely and a "lay reader" said it was the best thing I'd ever written. Hi, Dad!]

As for 4) and 5), dumb versions and exoticizing, it is hard to suggest anything about the former, except, "Don't do it!," and the pretentious tendency to uncritically laud anything European is as rampant as the tendency to uncritically dismiss anything European qua pretentious. As for readers of theory who read something and say, "I love it! I'm not sure if I understood it right, though," I can sympathize, but one's time really could be better spent than in being completely mystified by Agamben.

As for my recommendations of how NOT to be a lame reader of theory (ack! that sounds likea title for some dreaded Amazon list), I can only suggest patience and, to quote Derrida, "doing your homework." Zizek *is* a great introduction, but I think he has the potential to be a dead-end for a lot of readers, since he mostly points to Lacan (maybe the "hardest" of the lot). I would suggest starting with Baudrillard (because he has all the most exaggerated qualities imputed to theory) or Foucault, and reading whole books instead of just bits and pieces (or just Wikipedia). I have always said, you probably will get the first 10 or so books you read plain wrong or only partially, but you can always re-read, and once you are in the swing of things, it all is less mystifying. Right now I am reading in the line Kant-->Hegel-->Husserl-->Sartre, and after that I'll probably do Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Deleuze---since I don't "do" theory, I figure I have all the time in the world to get this background---but really you can do no wrong as long as your readings are honest and rigorous.

As for being intimidated by all this, that never got anyone anywhere, and if one is (as is most likely) intimidated by all the BAD versions of the "theory reader," why--all the more reason to get it right. Certainly one doesn't have to engage with these thinkers or their concerns, but they are as valid as the next, and at least raise interesting questions. Never mind how shaky the starting-point is.


Derrida obit in NY times
Guardian obit: "deep thinker or truth thief?"