"C. G. Estabrook" wrote:
>
> He has claimed that for almost all the subjects his MIT colleagues work on,
> he can find someone who can give him a straightforward and simple account
> of what they think. That that cannot be done for what some literary
> scholars have been calling theory for a generation is for him an
> indication that there is something profoundly wrong with it. And that
> seems plausible to me. --CGE
The key phrase here is "have been calling theory." When I first read in _Criticical Inquiry_ a couple of decades ago an article entitled, "Against Theory," I was quite baffled. Political activity and study had taken my attention away from what was happening in literary studies in the '70s and I lacked a sense of the article's context. What baffled me was that (a) the specific argument of the article seemed quite accurate: namely, that there was no theory of interpretation that could constrain a particular act of interpretation. But I could not for the life of me figure out (just from the article) what in the world this argument had to do with the generalization expressed in the title. I never have quite caught up with all the history of the profession which I had missed in the '70s, but it was a change which went under the battle flag of Theory. The authors of "Against Theory" were followers of Rorty, and while the article focused on literary interpretation, they really meant the generality of the title was well.
But I do not believe that one can get from "No Theory of X" to "No theory of Y." I would mostly agree that what has been called Theory in literature departments for the last quarter of a century is mostly bullshit. I don't think this is any evidence that there can be no systematic study, expressed in theory, of historical subject matter.*
It's been several years now from my last MLA convention (in Chicago), but I remember chatting with Louis Kampf at that convention, and it was in the context of some discussion of Marxism that Lou repeated Chomsky's assertion that there could not be a theory of society. (The MIT SDS chapter had been created back in the mid '60s in a course that Chomsky and Kampf co-taught.) I think that is the main target Chomsky has in mind when he makes statements of this sort.
Carrol
*I think the comparison with physics is a red herring: biology fails of meeting that standard as much as historical materialism does. It is simply a false standard. Now I think one can legitimately debate what Marx meant by the word "science," but leaving that aside he was clear in giving that label to the political economists up to and including Ricardo (but not beyond) that he discusses in _Theories of Surplus Valute_. In other words, physics and political economy have nearly equal family trees, and a definition of science that does not include both as points of departure is simply not a very good definition of science.