RE: writ large

great article Cecilia. the overall silence of Skip Gates and Homi
Bhabha confuses me. they're normally so eloquent and outspoken.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-bananafish@roughdraft.org
[mailto:owner-bananafish@roughdraft.org] On Behalf Of Cecilia Baader
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2003 2:02 AM
To: bananafish@roughdraft.org
Subject: writ large

So. The way I figure it, it's the bananafish writ large:

The Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn't Matter
By EMILY EAKIN
NYT

These are uncertain times for literary scholars. The era of big theory
is over. The grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments
in the 20th century - psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism,
deconstruction, post-colonialism - have lost favor or been abandoned.
Money is tight. And the leftist politics with which literary theorists
have traditionally been associated have taken a beating.

In the latest sign of mounting crisis, on April 11 the editors of
Critical Inquiry, academe's most prestigious theory journal, convened
the scholarly equivalent of an Afghan-style loya jirga. They invited
more than two dozen of America's professorial elite, including Henry
Louis Gates Jr., Homi Bhabha, Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson, to the
University of Chicago for what they called "an unprecedented meeting of
the minds," an unusual two-hour public symposium on the future of
theory.

Understandably, expectations were high. More than 500 people, mostly
students and faculty, squeezed into a lecture hall to hear what the
mandarins had to say, while latecomers made do with a live video feed
set up in the lobby.

In his opening remarks, W. J. T. Mitchell, the journal's editor and a
professor of English and art history at Chicago, set an upbeat tone for
the proceedings. "We want to be the Starship Enterprise of criticism and
theory," he told the audience.

But any thought that this would be a gleeful strategy session with an
eye toward extending theory's global reach, or an impassioned debate
over the merits of, say, Derrida and Lacan, was quickly dispelled.

When John Comaroff, a professor of anthropology and sociology at Chicago
who was serving as the event's moderator, turned the floor over to the
panelists, for several moments no one said a word.

Then a student in the audience spoke up. What good is criticism and
theory, he asked, if "we concede in fact how much more important the
actions of Noam Chomsky are in the world than all the writings of
critical theorists combined?"

After all, he said, Mr. Fish had recently published an essay in Critical
Inquiry arguing that philosophy didn't matter at all.

Behind a table at the front of the room, Mr. Fish shook his head. "I
think I'll let someone else answer the question," he said.

So Sander L. Gilman, a professor of liberal arts and sciences at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, replied instead. "I would make the
argument that most criticism - and I would include Noam Chomsky in this
- is a poison pill," he said. "I think one must be careful in assuming
that intellectuals have some kind of insight. In fact, if the track
record of intellectuals is any indication, not only have intellectuals
been wrong almost all of the time, but they have been wrong in corrosive
and destructive ways."

Mr. Fish nodded approvingly. "I like what that man said," he said. "I
wish to deny the effectiveness of intellectual work. And especially, I
always wish to counsel people against the decision to go into the
academy because they hope to be effective beyond it."

During the remainder of the session, the only panelist to venture a
defense of theory - or mention a literary genre - was Mr. Bhabha. "There
are a number of people around the table here and a number of people in
the audience, in fact most of you here are evidence that intellectual
work has its place and its uses," he insisted. "Even a poem in its own
oblique way is deeply telling of the lives of the world we exist in. You
can have poems that are intimately linked with political oppositional
movements, poems that actually draw together people in acts of
resistance."

But no one spoke up to endorse this claim. In fact, for a conference
officially devoted to theory, theory itself got very little airtime. For
more than an hour, the panelists bemoaned the war in Iraq, the Bush
administration, the ascendancy of the right-wing press and the impotence
of the left. Afterward, Mr. Gates, who arrived late because he had been
attending a conference in Wisconsin, said: "For a moment, I thought I
was in the wrong room. I thought we would be talking about academic
jargon. Instead, it was Al Qaeda and Iraq - not that there's anything
wrong with that."

Finally, a young man with dreadlocks who said he was a graduate student
from Jamaica asked, "So is theory simply just a nice, simple
intellectual exercise, or something that should be transformative?"

Several speakers weighed in before Mr. Gates stood up. As far as he
could tell, he said, theory had never directly liberated anyone. "Maybe
I'm too young," he said. "I really didn't see it: the liberation of
people of color because of deconstruction or poststructuralism."

If theory's political utility is this dubious, why did the theorists
spend so much time talking about current events? Catharine R. Stimpson,
a panelist and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New
York University, offered one, well, theory. "This particular group of
intellectuals," she said, "has a terror of being politically
irrelevant."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Received on Wed Apr 23 02:19:06 2003