[lbo-talk] French Theory

C. G. Estabrook galliher at uiuc.edu
Wed Sep 24 17:57:42 PDT 2008


I'll look at this with interest. My settled opinion was that Eagleton had put paid to the whole business with After Theory (2004).

Do you find Cusset interesting as more than a nostalgia trip? Anyone kicking around universities in the most recent fin-de-siecle will undoubtedly find golden memories here, but is there any current significance to it? --CGE

shag wrote:
> Dewds! I'm quite excited by this book, Francois Cusset's _French Theory: How
> Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual LIfe of the
> United States_. It is not as fantabulous as Janet Halley's _Split Decisions_,
> but it is nonetheless a terrific intellectual history of French theory as it
> was taken up in the United States. I totally think Chuck Grimes might like
> this book because of his interest in art. So much of the early rise of French
> theory had to do with the co-mingling between scholars of French literature
> and language, artists, writers, activists, musicians, and various academic
> types from the humanities, mostly English, who would stumble over some
> translation in a dog-eared mimeographed copy that was passed from person to
> person, "Here, check this out," or left about at clubs, coffee houses,
> communal storefronts, anarchist spaces, etc.
>
> 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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