> The New York Times
> April 19, 2003
> The Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn't Matter
> By EMILY EAKIN
>
> 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.
Hardly. It's just that the rot of the US Empire is finally hitting the privileged core elite of the academariat. The MLA reported last November that 20% of the lit jobs in the US had vanished in a single year -- this was *before* the budgetary B-52 strikes began to hit the states.
Then there's the internal rot. One small example: the Modern Language Association, the biggest trade group of lit scholars, did not have one single panel on the videogame culture at its 2002 Dec meeting. Hey, the videogame culture is only a $50 billion annual industry which is larger than film, more influential than anime, and the only high-tech market showing signs of life these days. Un-freaking-believable. We should be hitting up EA and Nintendo for funding, just like the scientists go after Novartis and Intel: the best defense is a good offense. Any discipline which fearfully walls itself off from the future just isn't going to have one.
> 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.
No, they damn well *should* be discussing the onslaught of Mordor. The task of theory is to decode the workings of the total system, to think through micropolitical resistances/geopolitical alternatives.
> 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."
And what did Malcolm X, MLK, CLR James, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and so many others do as activists and leaders, other than deconstruct and disassemble the binary mythologies of racism and imperialism? Theory is the greatest, indispensable weapon of the Left: it is Neo running loose in the Matrix, the informatic One who symbolizes the proletarian solidarity of Hardt & Negri's multitudinous All. The deficiencies of actually existing theory/democracy/socialism require *more* theory/democracy/socialism, not less.
-- DRR
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