Relying on information second hand, even from The New York Times, is invariably risky. But Anastasios Kozaitis posted this story from the Times to the Poetics listserv on Saturday. chris cheek then forwarded it to the British Poets list. The idea of a conference to discuss the irrelevance of theory is just too cute – and cuteness is no doubt precisely what Critical Inquiry had in mind in hosting the conference at the University of Chicago. This is the academic equivalent of a Jeff Koons porcelain puppy.

 

All the usual suspects appear to have been present – Stanley Fish, Homi Bhabha, Skip Gates, Fred Jameson, W.J.T. Mitchell, Catherine Stimpson, Sander Gilman – plus of course an audience of 500. The premise of the discussion, to be only slightly reductive, is that theory has no direct impact on politics, ergo cannot stop the depredations of George – “the most dangerous president ever” – Bush, ergo is impotent.

 

I wasn’t at the conference & don’t have access to the various comments speakers made. But what was notably not present in Emily Eakins’ Times report was any reference to the domain about which all these theorists were trained to theorize. To wit: literature.

 

This, it seems to me, is no accident. Over the past thirty years, normative academic theory – save for a few infamous instances, such as Jameson or Andrew Ross slumming among the language poets – has shown almost no concern whatsoever for contemporary literature. If anything, it has shown a combination of fear & ignorance. Thus Stimpson once characterized the MacArthur Fellows – she was then the director of that program – as “pushing the envelope” on the very same day that a Fellowship was granted to Richard Howard. Sealing the envelope would have been more accurate. Normative theory’s famous penchant for the 19^th century has had much to do at least in part with the fact that dead writers tend to be safer – they don’t talk back & are less to write & publish something in the future that will embarrass the critic. A discipline that was itself once blindsided when Paul DeMan was shown have collaborated with the Nazis in Belgium might develop a sense of caution.* Ever the practitioner of the self-congratulating artifact, Fish’s own public distrust of theory dates back to that period.

 

Not surprisingly, theory’s antipathy for contemporary writing has less to do with fears that Lee Ann Brown or Brian Kim Stefans will join the Bush administration than it does with institutional positioning. To direct literary theory toward actually existing contemporary poetry & fiction would be to suggest that writing is, in fact, what literary theory might be about. Current writing & the future of writing. Contested writing. A practice that is by no means contained in the Bantustan of the academy. That is not what contemporary theory has been about – it is about, & virtually all it has been about, at least in the United States, is institutional power. Which for this coterie of theorists means the institution of the academy, not the broader, diverse, motley field of poetry. Thus there is as yet not one substantive work of theory by an American academic not already thoroughly integrated into the poetry world that has had a substantial impact on poetry.

 

One downstream consequence of this is to intellectually (or at least academically) fortify even well-intended critical applications of theory from feeling any need to actually understand the field such works presume to discuss. Thus, for instance, one can find a theoretically sophisticated text such as Elisabeth Frost’s The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry and discover, in its index, not a single citation – not one – for Helen Adam, Paula Gunn Allen, Rae Armantrout, Julia Blumenreich, Lee Ann Brown, Tina Darragh, Jean Day, Diane Di Prima, Lynne Dreyer, Judy Grahn, Fanny Howe, Joanne Kyger, Denise Levertov, Sheila E. Murphy, Alice Notely, Pat Parker, Joan Retallack, Chris Tysh, Cecilia Vicuña, Anne Waldman, or Diane Ward. Do you honestly think that a text that cites Barthes, Lacan, Irigaray, Kristeva, Freud – it even mentions me twice – but excludes all of these core examples of its own alleged topic is going to have any street cred? But street cred with poets is all too obviously not the point. When you have theory, who needs to know the subject?

 

Indeed, we have seen plenty of universities – UC San Diego is a perfect example – where a system of adjuncts and visiting poets has been used literally for decades to ensure that there are not enough creative writing faculty tenured to take over the literature program from an otherwise theory-driven faculty. That’s academic malpractice, no doubt, & the future of literary history will deal harshly with the tenured few who permitted that to happen. But would you, if you were Stimpson or Fish, hand over the reigns of your discipline to the likes of Bob Grenier, Bob Holman, Amiri Baraka or Hannah Weiner? The truth is – tho you know it would make for a better department, a livelier program – you would not.

 

So theory generally treats contemporary writing disdainfully if at all. The problem of that approach, however, is that it cuts the normative theorist off from any relevance to the world. To turn their attention to politics, or psychology or economics or film or urban planning, is roughly akin to turning their attention to basketball – it keeps them occupied, but the fantasy that they could have any impact in any of these fields demonstrates considerably less contact with reality than Hannah Weiner ever had. 

 

What this conference on the relevance of theory, or lack thereof, comes down to, I suspect, is actually a curious case of Sam Hamill envy on the part of both organizers & participants. Hamill, by virtue of his refusal to participate in tea with Mrs. Bush, set off a round of attention to the fact that poets were & are against U.S. aggression & an imperial state. Theorists, by comparison, for all their impeccable institutional connections, are far less able to generate that kind of response & they no doubt must wonder why. Poets, it is worth noting, generally take Hamill’s project for the small beans it is, well meant but poorly executed, an almost comic case of unintended consequences. But poets – good, bad, indifferent – exist far more widely throughout society than do theorists. Only a tiny fraction of poetry is wedded to the university system – even less to the clique of trade publishers – & by no means is this fraction necessarily any better than that which, for example, works for computer companies or as librarians or as health professionals or in temp jobs in various cities.

 

Theory, at least as a normative academic phenomenon, lacks that same social base. A theorist who tried to function outside of the university system – think of Walter Benjamin – would be in deep weeds today.** There are no coffee house theory series, no Bowery Theory Club. And what recent theory has existed outside of that system – Steve Evans’ work in the early ‘90s would be a good case in point – has been closely connected to an actual aesthetic practice, such as contemporary poetry or film.

 

So, having thus insulated themselves from letting the likes of a Robert Duncan or Ted Berrigan take over the very discipline in which they exercise their power, these same normative theorists now find themselves reminded by an event as simple as Mr. Hamill’s refusal to come to tea that they have also successfully sealed themselves off from any possible societal impact. They don’t matter. At least they got that right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Those who envision the field of theory more broadly to include people trained in politics or economics were likewise left in problematic circumstances, to say the least, when Louis Althusser murdered his wife.

 

** Exactly the fate that greets those who don’t get jobs teaching.