...I probably had enough of the humanties theory binge of the eighties (early eighties in my case) when I went to school at the west coast headquarters of the deconstructionist mafia. The Derrida worship was rank. Paul DeMan came round to lecture on "Errinerung" and "Gedachnis" (sorry that English ASCII doesn't have the umlaut) in Hegel to reverent faculty and grad students. "Theory" was to be the royal road to career advancement for young professors. Whole lingos were a-brewing: differance (accent on the a), rhizome, pli (Deleuze), suture, slippage, abjection (Kristeva), postmodernism, episteme (Foucault), phallogocentrism (a feminist perversion, I think), in piles of books that no one (not even the professors who purported to know) could possibly read or adequately grasp in the time allowed by the syllabi, they were so "liberated" from "ordinary language."
Peter Kosenko ----------------
Ah, but a question. Onto the meta-narrative. Did it occur to you then or now, that this was a materially and historically grounded phenomenon? That it was not just a matter that academics got paid (Santa Cruz?) by the university and published. That there was also the question of how the subject areas, compositions, and narrative techniques took on the forms that they did?
Rather than try to attack this collection of work through some form of rationalism, I found it a lot more helpful (to my understanding, at least), to try and re-constitute its intellectual, social, political and economic ground, its material world and concrete context. From the first time I exposed myself to some of these collections (early Nineties), it was apparent that this was writing as art, theory for theory sake. As such it was explicitly a product of its times and circumstances like any other art form and could be understood in terms of its historical context. In other words, I could make sense of it through its own meta-narrative as a development in a broad intellectual history, and then tie that to the social, political, and economic forces that produced it.
So, I think that's more or less what Dennis Redmond is about doing. But DR is convinced (I think) that Adorno showed the way. I am not so sure about that. I am still stranded in Negative Dialectics and Dialectic of Enlightenment, so I remain unconvinced that Adorno can pull a materially grounded coherence out of the hat. Frankly I think he was too early in the developments, and too traumatized by the war and post-war era to see it clearly enough.
Frederick Jameson and David Harvey obviously come to mind and in fact turned my attention to the stance or method of a meta-narrative. So, I was enormously relieved of the burden and probable failure of trying to start one from scratch. I would even go so far as to say that at least part of the reason for a re-resurgence of intellectual interest in Marxism can be tied to the failure or collapse of traditional academic histories and their consequent inability to deal with these movements in literary and social theory.
That all of these developments occur almost simultaneously with the fall of eastern Europe and the USSR, the explosion of US, western EU and Asian economic globalization drives and their super-charged capital/cultural hegemony can't be random coincidences. Well, they are not of course. The question is about their mutual interactions; and naturally, how to change the human condition in relation to all that.
Chuck Grimes