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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