But I should repeat here that what is key for Cusset is the way French theory was taken up in the United States. (with the amusing fact that when the Sokal affair hit the pages of major Fr. newspapers, the French were bemused as the way the ideas had been taken up... wazzah? Or, that anyone cared about these debates anymore since the french had disposed of them a decade before. WTF was their response.
Speaking of fact, I remember years ago James Heartfield being astonished to learn that 50% of USers attend college, but only 25% graduate. That was from research in the late 90s. Current stats: 80% of USers attend college, 30% graduate. (The college graduate percentage in 1950 was 25%. Interesting stuff, those factoids.... which I learned in this book.)
What I'm finding fascinating is the intellectual history within which he places this taking up. For me, this book is providing answers to questions I've asked for years, sometimes right here at LBO. Number one, a question I've asked Carrol at least twice: what does 'theory' mean when people in literary studies and English departments use it.
Cusset shows how French theory entered the U.S. mainly through extra-academic counterculture spaces via journals and 'zines that were self-published in the early- to mid-70s -- mimeographed, stapled together, passed around at coffee houses, art houses, storefronts, anarchist spaces, and clubs like CBGBs, Danceteria, Mudd Club, Max's Kansas City, Beat Lounge (relevant quotage below).
Cusset brings up some interesting points I hadn't considered before. One, that U.S. campuses are set off from the public, with the exception of city universities like Columbia and even in some cities, the universities can be way out on the margins of said cities.
"But those integrated into the central areas of larger cities, where student life is mixed in which the local urban culture, can be counted on one hand -- and for that very reason they are all the more famous: they include New York University, which spills into Greenwich Village; UCLA, which has its larger cultural extension in the ex-hippie neighborhood of Venice; and the Berkeley campus which merges into the teeming street life of Telegraph Avenue. But the norm in these matters is rather the campus at the edge of the woods, its conformity with the agrarian mythology of nineteenth-century America according to which a bucolic setting far from the vices of the city will sere to guarantee probity, force of character, and academic excellence." (p. 35)
He also explains the relationship between New Criticism, the void left by the rising critique of this schoool of thought, and the rise of French theory.
I will write more as I go along because I haven't covered nearly half of what I've read so far. (I'm about 100 pages into it.)
Cusset writes:
"Whether one mentioned the names of Foucault and Deleuze in the back of a concert hall or in the patest pages of an alternative magazine ('Bomb,' 'Impulse,' 'East Village Eye'), French theory, diffuses and undefined, thus circulated in the margins of the margins.... A few chroniclers of this countercultural scene, after developing a passion for an author or at the instigation of a professor friend, made a place for these new ideas in the columns of the mainstream newspapers where they exercised greater influence, as was the case with the music critic at the New York Times, Adam Schatz, and the very "'68" Richard Goldstein at the Village Voice. But beyond these parallel circuits, the 1970s were above all a time of possible direct encounters between French authors and their American readers." (p. 66, _French Theory_)
He continues:
"French theory intervened precisely on the border separating the counterculture from the university, at the point where their porpositions become indiscernable, and where their mediators are often the same, whether they are anti-conformist teachers or party-loving poets who still show up in campus lecture halls. French theory delimited a zone in which artistic innovation and innovative courses on theory began to resonant with one another. Above all, it emerged in an American cultural field in which the elitist austerity of 'modernism' accussed of having frozen life in museums and libraries, was being confronted with the liberatory culture with no assigned territory of disciplinary compartmentalization. It was the innovative and spontaneously political culture of figures like John Cage and William Burroughs, already in a way a postcultural culture, irreducible to conventional cultural hierarchies, a culture in which the outcasts as well as the restless souls in the university were recognized as an integral part of the campus -- and for which the French authors thus played the role of theoretical counterpart to the "Duchamp-Cage-Warhol axis," the official avant-garde.
...
(French theory) became a site of an American *practice* for artists and activists who had no place of their own -- painters and militants, musicians and poets.... These figures were committed to shaking up American neuroses and conventions from within by intensifying them in experimental forms: John Cage by undoing music from melody, Merce Cunningham by inventing powerful, almost telluric choreographies, and Kathy Acker by improvising a a polyphonic autofiction, a mixture of plagiarism and errant movement around a schizo, multiple writing subject, an "I" more polemical than ego-centered." (p. 69-72, _French Theory_)
I will write more later!
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