The Fetishization of 'Theory' and the Prefixes 'Post'

and 'After'
Patrick Ffrench
Paragraph, Volume 29, Number 3, November 2006, pp. 105-114 (Article)
Published by Edinburgh University Press
DOI: 10.1353/prg.2007.0005
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The Fetishization of Theory and the
Prexes Post and After
PATRICK FFRENCH
Colin Davis, After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory (London,
Routledge, 2004), 210 pp.; Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London,
Penguin, 2003), 225 pp.; Michael Payne and John Schad (editors),
Life.After.Theory (London, Continuum, 2003), xi C196 pp.; Jean-
Michel Rabat e, The Future of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002),
v C170 pp.
An immediate problem with the designation post-theory or after
theory is the question of what is named by the word theory. The
word has taken on a status beyond the mere result of the practice of
theorizing or the act of theoretical reection, and in effect functions
something like a proper noun designating a rather nebulous entity
which seems to cover a multitude of supposed sins. Qualied by an
adjective such as literary, political, social or quantum the word
has a specic and identiable sense. But on its own, theory, like other
proper nouns, is a word which has lost its semantic content and func-
tions as a synecdoche, as a kind of shorthand, in connection either with
other nouns emptied of content, like poststructuralism, or in connec-
tion with a series of names (variously, in the works under consideration
here: Althusser, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, L evi-Strauss, Baudrillard,
Lyotard, Levinas, Kristeva, Tel Quel, Rorty, Jameson, Butler. . .), or
in connection with a cultural and pseudo-geographic identication
(theory is French, a French invasion of the US, or, for Eagleton,
American (Eagleton, 186)). The proper noun theory, which does
not function in France (in an interview in 2001 Derrida maintained
that he did not use the term (Payne, 8)), thus has the status of a myth.
Roland Barthes describes the myth as a parole, that is, as a discourse,
in which the primary linguistic level of signication has been para-
sitically appropriated by a second discursive order, which feeds off
the linguistic signication of the rst level but supplements it with a
series of ideological associations.
1
The connection with the rst level
of linguistic signication, however, ensures that the myth can appear
to derive from the order of literal language and thus appear innocent
Paragraph 29:3 (2006) 105114
106 Paragraph
of ideological intent. If theory is a myth, then, rather than a practice,
mythological analysis would identify in it such implied notions as
French, jargon-ridden, abstract, irresponsible, perverse, against
common-sense, and so on. Strangely, the reication of the practice
of theorizing in the proper noun theory at the same time freezes and
masks a historical derivation. Theory, as noted above, is not rigid
and exact in the historical or geographic origin it identies. The term
covers, according to context and to the intent of those who wield it,
the multiple and varied bodies of thought which emerged in France
in the 1960s and after, but also in some cases the earlier and later work
of the Frankfurt School (see Rabat e, 5065), as well as the work of
thinkers whose work emerged after the so-called invasion of French
theory in the United States. The mythic designation theory whites
out the precise historical chronology of its emergence, as well as the
differential detail of this emergence. Indeed, insofar as proper names
such as theory, poststructuralism or postmodernism are almost
never used in the same way in French, the language in which for the
most part they are supposed to have originated, we might suppose
that the reication of theory is always after the event. This is to say
that theory does not apply so much to the writings of Barthes, Lacan,
Derrida, Foucault and others, as to their effects. The myth of theory
would in this sense always be after theory; theory would always be
after itself.
However, even if we accept for a moment that this term theory
works like a myth, and therefore that it is an ideological and imaginary
entity rather than a practice with its basis in the real, it is indubitable
that this myth produces effects in the real. Reied theory has real
political effects, one of which is to obscure and indeed prevent
theoretical practice as such. The myth of theory thus asks for
analysis.
In the light of the notion that theory, whether capitalized or
not, has a mythic function, the designation after theory implies
the following kind of views: the era of abstract theorizing about
literature is over and we can now get back to the real business
of reading books; the moment of theory having passed, it is now
possible or necessary or both to engage with real political issues;
theory, which had an ahistorical bias, is now a historical object and
can be assessed as such, historically; given the current political climate
it is now irresponsible to hold the relativistic views characteristic of
postmodernism; since the moment of theory has passed we can now
return to the positive assessment of those terms and ideas which it
The Fetishization of Theory and the Prexes Post and After 107
treated with skepticism: nature, humanity, experience. . . After theory
implies a pseudo-history, an untheorized notion of historical progress
or evolution which purports to be historical while in effect masking
the historical condition of its object. It pays then to consider the
historicity of the myth.
If we consider for a moment the thesis that the historical moment
of theory has passed, it may rst be necessary to determine what this
historical moment is. This involves more patient consideration than
the detractors of theory tend to allow. Eagletons After Theory, for
example, while it recognizes the value of theorizing in the sense of
intellectual commitment and, more specically, the relativization of
nature, targets something he calls postmodernism without offering
any historical or textual points of reference which would allow us
to identify this object (see Eagleton, 13). In this polemic, theory
and postmodernism designate something like an attitude which it
would seem implausible to attribute to any of the core proponents
of the discourses which emerged in France in the 1950s, 1960s and
after or those who worked in their wake in other contexts. In his
useful and seductive book The Future of Theory, however, Jean-Michel
Rabat e offers helpful historical and intellectual contextualizations of
the emergence of what he calls theory. In particular, for Rabat e,
theory has a long-term derivation in certain readings of Hegel. In
After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory Colin Davis also
gives a series of patient and careful readings of the texts of core
gures such as Barthes, Foucault, Althusser, Levinas, Kristeva and
Derrida which plot out key moments of encounter and confrontation
in the trajectories of the thought and the lives of these writers. This
kind of intellectual history, which takes into account texts and their
intertexts as well as lives and their contingencies, can help us to situate
theory historically and thus enable an analytic, properly historical,
and properly dialectical sense (insofar as this mode of intellectual
historicization pays attention to the dynamic of a life in its time) of
what is meant by after theory. The polysemy of the after in after
theory is thus afrmed; as Davis notes (5), this endeavour is as much
in pursuit of theory (as an object of critical reection) as coming after
it. If we are to take seriously, then, the notion of an after theory, it
would be necessary to consider the specic conjunctures and contexts
in which the work of Althusser, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault and
so on arose. This work is being done but is partially hampered, and
necessarily future-oriented, to the extent that much of the work itself
of the writers and thinkers involved has yet to appear in publication
108 Paragraph
(Barthess and Foucaults lectures at the Coll` ege de France, Lacans
seminars). But this work is necessary before one leaps to the afrmation
that the present has superseded it. Given this, it might be possible to
say that the kind of intellectual activity in question arises from and
is determined by contingent, historical factors by encounters, the
disposition of groups, the biographies of those concerned. Theory
would thus be a historically and biographically determined object,
tied to the contingency of its time and the trajectories of lives. Its
time would be marked by certain critical events, by the context of
the Cold War and the fortunes of the Communist Party, particularly
in France, by the legacy of colonialism and decolonization, by the
Algerian War of Independence, by May 1968. Perhaps it might prove
possible to venture the generalization that the moment of 1968 was
particularly inuential on the bodies of work and thought produced
in the remaining years of that decade and in the 1970s, and perhaps
it might prove possible to say that they are characterized by a kind
of utopianism, by the belief that intellectual and cultural practices
were or could be determinative in the political arena. Then one could
afrm that the historical moment of theory had passed according
to the view which would hold that this utopia had been realized
in the postmodern era of individual self-determination and cultural
plurality and that new political problems had emerged or according
to the view that this utopian belief in the possibility of resistance had
been shown to be just that and the pragmatic realpolitik of capitalism
has triumphed. I will return to these questions later.
Theory, then, if one detects a historical reality behind the mythical
designation, arises in a context marked by its time. Context, however,
is of course never entirely determinative: the writing of Marx or
Freud, and, one may venture, Barthes or Derrida, is always marked by
the place and moment of its utterance, and the constellated network
or textual community in which it is inscribed. But, there is in the
nature of language (and it is not only Derrida who would tell us
this) a surplus which is disseminated and escapes the limits of this
determination. This is what makes translation, and indeed meaning,
possible. It is then the translation of theory (both in the broadest and
the most specic sense) that is more often than not the target of its
detractors (as Colin Davis shows in his reading of Sokal and Bricmont
(Davis, 2133)). Or rather, what is attacked by the detractors of
theory is a version of theory which itself derives from their translation
of it. Translation, betrayal, happens. But betrayal has its rules, one of
which might be to know what it is that one is betraying, as Genet
The Fetishization of Theory and the Prexes Post and After 109
or indeed Baudelaire would afrm, the most irreparable of vices is
to do evil out of stupidity (le plus irr eparable des vices est de faire
le mal par b etise).
2
This is to say that the ination of theory and its
reication are necessarily accompanied by a disregard for the historical
and biographical conditions of their incidence.
Ination may be an inevitable evil or in fact not an evil at all,
but some modes of ination are more responsible than others. The
particular kind that affects theoretical discourse may be a version of
the generalized tendency in recent intellectual and academic culture
towards accountancy. By this I mean that in intellectual and academic
culture, knowledge in the broadest sense is now beholden to have
an exchange value or transferability (in the knowledge economy).
Ideas and knowledge have under various pressures been moulded
into the form of commodities or products for package, exchange
and consumption. So certain kinds of intellectual practice have been
translated into theory and become fetishes, objectied commodities
which can be consumed in the classroom or the bookshop and
exchanged. Like many other things intellectual practice has fallen
under the rampant expansion of commodity fetishism. This is power-
fully ironic, given that theoretical writing of the kind in question
was more often than not designed by its adherents to resist exchange
value, to retain a basis in practice: the practice of reading, the practice
of psychoanalysis.
The fortunes of theory are indeed ironic. Arising in particular
intellectual and institutional conjunctures at the same time real,
historical and textual, theory was nevertheless distinct from polemic
and often from the orthodox and academically institutional modes
of doing philosophy, literary criticism or history. It was also distinct
from journalism, even though it may sometimes have borrowed this
mode of address. Barthess Mythologies is a case in point. Culled
from short vignettes written for magazines in the mid 1950s, the
book also appended the essay Myth Today in which Barthes makes
the inaugural move of theorizing by way of reference to Saussure
the practice he had adopted in the myths themselves. What one
retains from Mythologies, however, is perhaps as much the use of
Saussurean terms to conceptualize the order of myth as the attitude
of demysticatory vigilance on which Barthes insists at the beginning
of the essay: I wanted to grasp in the decorative exposition of what-
goes-without-saying the ideological abuse which, in my terms, is hidden
there.
3
In this light, theory consists as much in this Brechtian move
of distanciation from common sense as in the specic references
110 Paragraph
on which it draws. The vigilance of theory with regard to common
sense is also to be found, this time in the form of a philosophy of
language, in the work of Derrida, whose term diff erance insists on
the necessary dynamic of place and displacement at work in any
meaningful proposition. This is to say that the critique of common
sense is a critique of the xedness of meanings. Common sense in
effect masks under the suggestion of a shared agreement the reication
of meanings as historically frozen entities. At the risk of generalization
one could say that theory may involve this critique of meanings as
products and as fetishes. It insists upon process, on relativizing and
mobilizing the fetish and inducing a more mobile ow of desire, if
we follow the psychoanalytic logic of fetishism. It is particularly ironic
that theory should itself become a fetish. The aggressive critique of
theory-fetishism where it exists and produces effects in the real is then
something to be welcomed, but we should note that this critique
sometimes contributes to the fetishization of theory in the rst place.
If we view theory as a practice, rather than as a fetish, a number of
things follow. Anon-fetishistic approach to theory might paradoxically
involve a closer critical attention to the object itself. It becomes no
longer the object of an extreme attention, devotion or revilement
(amounting to the same) because it is thought to hide or stand in for
a lack. It becomes an ordinary object in the world, so to speak. This
view would see theoretical discourse as a written discourse with its
own peculiarities but more or less like any other in the sense that it
would offer itself to reading, contextualization, and critique. Reading
theory, or reading texts of theory, already defetishizes theory. As Davis
notes, the texts of the more virulent critics of theory are more often
than not characterized by a refusal to read or a agrant aunting of the
norms of critical analysis and study (Davis, Chapter 1). The resistance
to theory is, de Man noted, a resistance to reading.
4
Daviss After
Poststructuralism offers an acute analysis of this symptom, focusing in
part on one of the earlier anti-theory polemics the Barthes-Picard
debate over the imposture of criticism (921). Davis describes the
situation in which the critics of theory accuse it of reading badly but in
texts where they refuse to read. Indeed, as Davis afrms, key moments
in what is known as post-structuralist theory have involved not
the construction of systematic edices the naming of -isms but
processes of reading, engagements with texts (to take a few examples:
Barthes S/Z, most if not all of Derridas work, most if not all of
Kristevas writing). As well as analysing the symptom of the refusal to
read and the fetishistic reication of theory, Davis also offers a cure: in
The Fetishization of Theory and the Prexes Post and After 111
successive chapters he reads Foucault, Althusser, L evinas, Kristeva and
Derrida in ways that actively promote the value of repeated critical
engagement, not with a view to proving or disproving the validity of
models but with a view to providing an impetus for the discovery of
as yet unrealized zones of meaning (176).
5
A similar attention to the text is promoted by Rabat e, who enjoins
theory to go back to philosophy, not in the sense of a return but
as the systematic hystericization of philosophical problems. By this
he means a quest for truth that always aims at pointing out the
inadequacies of ofcial, serious and masterful knowledge (Rabat e,
150), and he draws on Lacans delineation of the discourse of the
hysteric, in which the (split) subject addresses the Master (S1) and
demand[s] that he or she show his or her stuff (. . .) by producing
something serious in the way of knowledge (18).
6
Hysteria, Barthesian
demystication, Brechtian distanciation and reading (in the de Manian
sense of suspicion) are thus similarly, hysterically, aligned in relation to
master discourses in their aim to unx the empty signier of mastery
(S1) and mobilize knowledge.
The irony, again, is that hysteria is often mobilized against theory,
which is itself seen as a master discourse. Another way of putting this
is that one womans hysteric is anothers master discourse. To the
extent that theory, in its reied form, becomes a master-discourse,
the kind of hysterical debunking practised by Eagleton, who employs
short-circuiting puns and contractions throughout After Theory, is
salutary. This said, Daviss After Poststructuralism would for me be a
more essential addition to a students reading list for a literary or
critical theory course, in that it offers something of the knowledge
that hysteria demands. This is partly because Eagletons book is not
really about theory, but about fundamentalism; Eagletons revilement
of poststructuralism gives way in his nal chapters (174222) to a
more serious call for a critical engagement with fundamentalisms. His
argument is that postmodernist relativization is incapable of dealing
with fundamentalism at a fundamental level, because it eschews
fundamentals completely, and does not have the tools. This implies
a certain faith in theory, as I understand that word, since it implies
that critical and intellectual, discursive reection and questioning have
the capacity to engage with fundamentalism. It implies a faith in
the capacity of theory to resist entrenched power or fanatically held
beliefs.
Even though Eagletons apparent target (poststructuralism) is, as
noted above, a rather nebulous subject that seems at different moments
112 Paragraph
to be equated with relativism, cultural studies, or simply the American
way of life, the argument poses a more serious question about
the difference in historical contexts between the time of theory
(mythied again) and the present. If the term after theory means that
the historical conditions of the present are different from those that
determined intellectual practice in France in the 1960s and 1970s, this
suggestion is accurate. The position of the intellectual with regard to
the orthodoxies of Stalinism on the one hand and Gaullism on the
other could be said to be one in which a hysteria with regard to master
discourses and a suspicion of grand narratives had a certain efcacy
and punctual acuity in the political arena. But as Foucault would later
afrm, power is not localized in such a way that resistance can once
and for all identify its object. The discourse of the Master in fact
persists beneath the discourse of the University (in Lacans theory of
the four discourses
7
), a situation currently being described by Jacques-
Alain Miller as the dominance of statistical reason.
8
This is to say
that the conjuncture of the present is not one explicitly characterized
by repressive orthodoxy, but one characterized by an afrmation of
cultural difference. This is a situation in which everything is permitted
but nothing is possible, and it is one characterized by a M obian logic
in which the afrmation of freedom and democracy turns into its
apparent underside: a negation of life and a production of death.
In The Will to Knowledge Foucault had already offered a prescient
analysis of what he called biopolitics, in which the efcient management
of life is doubled by a production of death an analysis furthered
more recently in the work of Agamben.
9
The demands with which
history confronts intellectual practice are thus different. After theory
might thus be taken to mean theory in the time of globalization,
fundamentalisms of all persuasions, after 9/11, Guantanamo Bay.
Eagleton wants in the latter part of his book to offer a theo-
retical account of fundamentalism which would be a step towards
engaging with history with resources (. . .) equal in depth and scope
to the situation it confronts (222). His argument draws on Freud,
but also resonates with certain moments in the work of Barthes and
Derrida. Fundamentalism, he proposes, is obsessively tied to a liter-
alness of interpretation (204). Such literalness denies the necessary
contingency, plurality and mobility of writing. In Eagletons terms
it denies the roughness of meaning (204). Fundamentalists are thus
fetishists (208) the fundamental insistence that this or that sacred
text means exactly what it says is there to plug the hole of non-being
or smooth over roughness. This recalls Derridas proposition that the
The Fetishization of Theory and the Prexes Post and After 113
anxiety which holds a static structure in place is an anxiety about
being at stake or in play, of being as a being always at stake in the
game (d etre comme etre dentr ee de jeu dans le jeu), about being
contaminated by the contingency and mobility of meaning.
10
Barthes,
whose entire uvre could be seen as an attempt to overcome this
anxiety and turn it into jouissance, responded to this by proposing what
he called a responsibility of forms, a critical awareness that the mode of
ones utterance was as determinative of its reception as its content.
For Eagleton, fundamentalists, moreover, wreak the very thing of
which they are so fearful non-being or death in their desire to
evade it; in their desire to deny contingency by freezing meaning
into literalness they produce non-being, the very lack of foundation
which they strive to avoid. A certain roughness in the law or a more
malleable way of accommodating non-being in the world, Eagleton
argues, is desirable.
Thus, on the one hand, Eagleton seems to use arguments very
consonant with the thing which his book suggests he might be
attacking theory. On the other hand, however, he raises the stakes
of what theory or whatever one wants to call it might be able
to do, and this raising of the stakes should be taken very seriously.
A similar call, this time in the form of a question, was voiced by
Judith Butler, John Guillory and Kendall Thomas in the preface to
the 2000 collective volume Whats Left of Theory?
11
The authors ask:
why are we, as a profession, ghosted by a formalism that never was?
And how might we continue to generalize the conditions of our
practice without receding from the world that calls upon us to engage
in politically responsible ways and [from] the literary texts whose
specicity and challenge it remains the task of literary scholars to
read? Theory, here, appears as a critically responsible generalization
of the conditions of [our] practice one of whose tasks is to consider
the ways in which reading texts relates to the political demands of our
time. This practice is not something that one should consider to have
been surpassed, such that one can say that we are living after it, or
have got over it.
NOTES
1 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers (New York,
Noonday Press, 1972), 109 [translation modied].
2 Charles Baudelaire, Petits po` emes en prose: Le Spleen de Paris (Paris, Garnier
Flammarion, 1967), 110.
114 Paragraph
3 Barthes, Mythologies, 11.
4 See Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, Minnesota University
Press, 1986).
5 Davis is citing Malcolm Bowies Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory
(Oxford, Blackwell, 1993), 47.
6 Rabat e citing Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance
(Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995), 133.
7 The discussion of the four discourses can be found in Jacques Lacan, Le
S eminaire Livre XVII: LEnvers de la psychanalyse (Paris, Seuil, 1991).
8 Jacques-Alain Miller, Orientation lacanienne, unpublished seminar of Feb-
ruary 2004, Ecole de la Cause Freudienne.
9 See Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualit e I : La Volont e de savoir (Paris,
Gallimard, 1976) and Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Stanford University
Press, 1998).
10 Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (London, Rout-
ledge, 2004), 278 [translation modied].
11 Judith Butler, John Guillory and Kendall Thomas, Preface in Whats Left of
Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory edited by Judith Butler, John
Guillory and Kendall Thomas (London, New York, Routledge, 2000), xii.