For Rey writer only

Chapter 1 What is theory?

In literary and cultural studies these days there is a lot of talk about

theory – not theory of literature, mind you; just plain ‘theory’. To

anyone outside the field, this usage must seem very odd. ‘Theory of

what?’ you want to ask. It’s surprisingly hard to say. It is not the theory

of anything in particular, nor a comprehensive theory of things in

general. Sometimes theory seems less an account of anything than an

activity – something you do or don’t do. You can be involved with

theory; you can teach or study theory; you can hate theory or be afraid

of it. None of this, though, helps much to understand what theory is.

‘Theory’, we are told, has radically changed the nature of literary

studies, but people who say this do not mean literary theory, the

systematic account of the nature of literature and of the methods for

analysing it. When people complain that there is too much theory in

literary studies these days, they don’t mean too much systematic

reflection on the nature of literature or debate about the distinctive

qualities of literary language, for example. Far from it. They have

something else in view.

What they have in mind may be precisely that there is too much

discussion of non-literary matters, too much debate about general

questions whose relation to literature is scarcely evident, too much

reading of difficult psychoanalytical, political, and philosophical texts.

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Theory is a bunch of (mostly foreign) names; it means Jacques Derrida,

Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Louis

Althusser, Gayatri Spivak, for instance.

The term theory

So what is theory? Part of the problem lies in the term theory itself,

which gestures in two directions. On the one hand, we speak of ‘the

theory of relativity’, for example, an established set of propositions. On

the other hand, there is the most ordinary use of the word theory.

‘Why did Laura and Michael split up?’

‘Well, my theory is that . . .’

What does theory mean here? First, theory signals ‘speculation’. But a

theory is not the same as a guess. ‘My guess is that . . .’ would suggest

that there is a right answer, which I don’t happen to know: ‘My guess is

that Laura just got tired of Michael’s carping, but we’ll find out for sure

when their friend Mary gets here.’ A theory, by contrast, is speculation

that might not be affected by what Mary says, an explanation whose

truth or falsity might be hard to demonstrate.

‘My theory is that . . .’ also claims to offer an explanation that is not

obvious. We don’t expect the speaker to continue, ‘My theory is that it’s

because Michael was having an affair with Samantha.’ That wouldn’t

count as a theory. It hardly requires theoretical acumen to conclude that

if Michael and Samantha were having an affair, that might have had

some bearing on Laura’s attitude toward Michael. Interestingly, if the

speaker were to say, ‘My theory is that Michael was having an affair with

Samantha,’ suddenly the existence of this affair becomes a matter of

conjecture, no longer certain, and thus a possible theory. But generally,

to count as a theory, not only must an explanation not be obvious; it

should involve a certain complexity: ‘My theory is that Laura was always

secretly in love with her father and that Michael could never succeed in

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becoming the right person.’ A theory must be more than a hypothesis:

it can’t be obvious; it involves complex relations of a systematic kind

among a number of factors; and it is not easily confirmed or disproved.

If we bear these factors in mind, it becomes easier to understand what

goes by the name of ‘theory’.

Theory as genre

Theory in literary studies is not an account of the nature of literature or

methods for its study (though such matters are part of theory and will

be treated here, primarily in Chapters 2, 5, and 6). It’s a body of thinking

and writing whose limits are exceedingly hard to define. The

philosopher Richard Rorty speaks of a new, mixed genre that began in

the nineteenth century: ‘Beginning in the days of Goethe and Macaulay

and Carlyle and Emerson, a new kind of writing has developed which is

neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor

intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor social prophecy, but all of

these mingled together in a new genre.’ The most convenient

designation of this miscellaneous genre is simply the nickname theory,

which has come to designate works that succeed in challenging and

reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently

belong. This is the simplest explanation of what makes something count

as theory. Works regarded as theory have effects beyond their original

field.

This simple explanation is an unsatisfactory definition but it does seem

to capture what has happened since the 1960s: writings from outside

the field of literary studies have been taken up by people in literary

studies because their analyses of language, or mind, or history, or

culture, offer new and persuasive accounts of textual and cultural

matters. Theory in this sense is not a set of methods for literary study

but an unbounded group of writings about everything under the sun,

from the most technical problems of academic philosophy to the

changing ways in which people have talked about and thought about

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the body. The genre of ‘theory’ includes works of anthropology, art

history, film studies, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy, political

theory, psychoanalysis, science studies, social and intellectual history,

and sociology. The works in question are tied to arguments in these

fields, but they become ‘theory’ because their visions or arguments

have been suggestive or productive for people who are not studying

those disciplines. Works that become ‘theory’ offer accounts others can

use about meaning, nature and culture, the functioning of the psyche,

the relations of public to private experience and of larger historical

forces to individual experience.

Theory’s effects

If theory is defined by its practical effects, as what changes people’s

views, makes them think differently about their objects of study and

their activities of studying them, what sort of effects are these?

The main effect of theory is the disputing of ‘common sense’: common-

sense views about meaning, writing, literature, experience. For

example, theory questions

• the conception that the meaning of an utterance or text is what the

speaker ‘had in mind’,

• or the idea that writing is an expression whose truth lies elsewhere,

in an experience or a state of affairs which it expresses,

• or the notion that reality is what is ‘present’ at a given moment.

Theory is often a pugnacious critique of common-sense notions, and

further, an attempt to show that what we take for granted as ‘common

sense’ is in fact a historical construction, a particular theory that has

come to seem so natural to us that we don’t even see it as a theory. As a

critique of common sense and exploration of alternative conceptions,

theory involves a questioning of the most basic premisses or

assumptions of literary study, the unsettling of anything that might

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have been taken for granted: What is meaning? What is an author?

What is it to read? What is the ‘I’ or subject who writes, reads, or acts?

How do texts relate to the circumstances in which they are produced?

What is an example of some ‘theory’? Instead of talking about theory in

general, let us plunge right into some difficult writing by two of the

most celebrated theorists to see what we can make of it. I propose two

related but contrasting cases, which involve critiques of common-sense

ideas about ‘sex’, ‘writing’, and ‘experience’.

Foucault on sex

In his book The History of Sexuality, the French intellectual historian

Michel Foucault considers what he calls ‘the repressive hypothesis’: the

common idea that sex is something that earlier periods, particularly the

nineteenth century, have repressed and that moderns have fought to

liberate. Far from being something natural that was repressed, Foucault

suggests, ‘sex’ is a complex idea produced by a range of social practices,

investigations, talk, and writing – ‘discourses’ or ‘discursive practices’

for short – that come together in the nineteenth century. All the sorts of

talk – by doctors, clergy, novelists, psychologists, moralists, social

workers, politicians – that we link with the idea of the repression of

sexuality were in fact ways of bringing into being the thing we call ‘sex’.

Foucault writes, ‘The notion of “sex” made it possible to group

together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological

functions, conducts, sensations, pleasures; and it enabled one to make

use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent

meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere.’ Foucault is not denying

that there are physical acts of sexual intercourse, or that humans have a

biological sex and sexual organs. He is claiming that the nineteenth

century found new ways of grouping together under a single category

(‘sex’) a range of things that are potentially quite different: certain acts,

which we call sexual, biological distinctions, parts of bodies,

psychological reactions, and, above all, social meanings. People’s ways

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of talking about and dealing with these conducts, sensations, and

biological functions created something different, an artificial unity,

called ‘sex’, which came to be treated as fundamental to the identity of

the individual. Then, by a crucial reversal, this thing called ‘sex’ was seen

as the cause of the variety of phenomena that had been grouped

together to create the idea. This process gave sexuality a new

importance and a new role, making sexuality the secret of the

individual’s nature. Speaking of the importance of the ‘sexual urge’ and

our ‘sexual nature’, Foucault notes that we have reached the point

where we expect our intelligibility to come from what was for many

centuries thought of as madness, . . . our identity from what was

perceived as a nameless urge. Hence the importance we ascribe to it, the

reverential fear with which we surround it, the care we take to know it.

Hence the fact that over the centuries it has become more important to

us than our soul.

One illustration of the way sex was made the secret of the individual’s

being, a key source of the individual’s identity, is the creation in the

nineteenth century of ‘the homosexual’ as a type, almost a ‘species’.

Earlier periods had stigmatized acts of sexual intercourse between

individuals of the same sex (such as sodomy), but now it became a

question not of acts but of identity, not of whether someone had

performed forbidden actions but of whether he ‘was’ a homosexual.

Sodomy was an act, Foucault writes, but ‘the homosexual was now a

species’. Previously there were homosexual acts in which people might

engage; now it was a question, rather, of a sexual core or essence

thought to determine the very being of the individual: Is he a

homosexual?

In Foucault’s account, ‘sex’ is constructed by the discourses linked with

various social practices and institutions: the way in which doctors,

clergy, public officials, social workers, and even novelists treat

phenomena they identify as sexual. But these discourses represent sex

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as something prior to the discourses themselves. Moderns have largely

accepted this picture and accused these discourses and social practices

of trying to control and repress the sex they are in fact constructing.

Reversing this process, Foucault’s analysis treats sex as an effect rather

than a cause, the product of discourses which attempt to analyse,

describe, and regulate the activities of human beings.

Foucault’s analysis is an example of an argument from the field of

history that has become ‘theory’ because it has inspired and been taken

up by people in other fields. It is not a theory of sexuality in the sense

of a set of axioms purported to be universal. It claims to be an analysis

of a particular historical development, but it clearly has broader

implications. It encourages you to be suspicious of what is identified as

natural, as a given. Might it not, on the contrary, have been produced by

the discourses of experts, by the practices linked with discourses of

knowledge that claim to describe it? In Foucault’s account, it is the

attempt to know the truth about human beings that has produced ‘sex’

as the secret of human nature.

Theory’s moves

A characteristic of thinking that becomes theory is that it offers striking

‘moves’ that people can use in thinking about other topics. One such

move is Foucault’s suggestion that the supposed opposition between a

natural sexuality and the social forces (‘power’) that repress it might be,

rather, a relationship of complicity: social forces bring into being the

thing (‘sex’) they apparently work to control. A further move – a bonus,

if you will – is to ask what is achieved by the concealment of this

complicity between power and the sex it is said to repress. What is

achieved when this interdependency is seen as an opposition rather

than interdependency? The answer Foucault gives is that this masks the

pervasiveness of power: you think that you are resisting power by

championing sex, when in fact you are working entirely in the terms

that power has set. To put this another way, in so far as this thing called

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‘sex’ appears to lie outside power – as something social forces try in vain

to control – power looks limited, not very powerful at all (it can’t tame

sex). In fact, though, power is pervasive; it is everywhere.

Power, for Foucault, is not something someone wields but ‘power/

knowledge’: power in the form of knowledge or knowledge as power.

What we think we know about the world – the conceptual framework in

which we are brought to think about the world – exercises great power.

Power/knowledge has produced, for example, the situation where you

are defined by your sex. It has produced the situation that defines a

woman as someone whose fulfilment as a person is supposed to lie in a

sexual relationship with a man. The idea that sex lies outside and in

opposition to power conceals the reach of power/knowledge.

There are several important things to note about this example of

theory. Theory here in Foucault is analytical – the analysis of a concept –

but also inherently speculative in the sense that there is no evidence you

could cite to show that this is the correct hypothesis about sexuality.

(There is a lot of evidence that makes his account plausible but no

decisive test.) Foucault calls this kind of enquiry a ‘genealogical’

critique: an exposure of how supposedly basic categories, such as ‘sex’,

are produced by discursive practices. Such a critique does not try to tell

us what sex ‘really’ is but seeks to show how the notion has been

created. Note also that Foucault here does not speak of literature at all,

though this theory has proved to be of great interest to people studying

literature. For one thing, literature is about sex; literature is one of the

places where this idea of sex is constructed, where we find promoted

the idea that people’s deepest identities are tied to the kind of desire

they feel for another human being. Foucault’s account has been

important for people studying the novel as well as for those working in

gay and lesbian studies and in gender studies in general. Foucault has

been especially influential as the inventor of new historical objects:

things such as ‘sex’, ‘punishment’, and ‘madness’, which we had not

previously thought of as having a history. His works treat such things as

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historical constructions and thus encourage us to look at how the

discursive practices of a period, including literature, may have shaped

things we take for granted.

Derrida on writing

For a second example of ‘theory’ – as influential as Foucault’s revision of

the history of sexuality but with features that illustrate some differences

within ‘theory’ – we might look at an analysis by the contemporary

French philosopher Jacques Derrida of a discussion of writing and

experience in the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau is a

writer of the French eighteenth century often credited with helping to

bring into being the modern notion of the individual self.

But first, a bit of background. Traditionally, Western philosophy has

distinguished ‘reality’ from ‘appearance’, things themselves from

representations of them, and thought from signs that express it. Signs or

representations, in this view, are but a way to get at reality, truth, or

ideas, and they should be as transparent as possible; they should not

get in the way, should not affect or infect the thought or truth they

represent. In this framework, speech has seemed the immediate

manifestation or presence of thought, while writing, which operates

in the absence of the speaker, has been treated as an artificial and

derivative representation of speech, a potentially misleading sign of a

sign.

Rousseau follows this tradition, which has passed into common sense,

when he writes, ‘Languages are made to be spoken; writing serves only

as a supplement to speech.’ Here Derrida intervenes, asking ‘what is a

supplement?’ Webster’s defines supplement as ‘something that

completes or makes an addition’. Does writing ‘complete’ speech by

supplying something essential that was missing, or does it add

something that speech could perfectly well do without? Rousseau

repeatedly characterizes writing as a mere addition, an inessential extra,

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