french theory — new book to kvell about
By shag carpet bomb • Sep 24th, 2008 • Category: French Theory, Jane Sexes it UpDewds! 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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Last night I was skulking around and peeked through the window into LBO. Saw your note, and thought, now I could respond to that. So it was good to find it posted today. Although I’m running out of time tonight and may not complete mush of a comment.
‘answers to questions I’ve asked for years’ – I wish I’d known you had the question. I have partial answers. But first let me ask, did you know “French Theory” is the title of the French original. The joke starts on the cover. But what did ‘theory’ mean to the lit crit crowd. Cusset seems accurate enough on the text immanent criticism and its influence after the war. But he didn’t seem to make clear that the approach the it responded to was positivism with a romantic tincture. Of course, that positivism still thrived in the post-war. I would have added that the aesthetic and ethical claims of the New Criticism advance a national, political agenda of the kind they claimed to reject. Just universalized. Like post-war U.S. hegemony.
C’s focus on the French truncates the appearance of ‘theory’ on the American scene. The flip-side of U.S. hegemeony was ease of access to Europe, ‘jet-setting,’ and European writing. So the very linguistic literary structuralism and formalism of Czech and Russian scholars offered more rigorous tools for readings absorbed in the text. (Add on, semiotics too, specially Eco)The phenomenological side of German reception studies also fit what C., calls the cognitive concerns of text immanent reading, although the model of reader and text interacting rejects the finality of meaning. Even among the French, C. does not include the goofier ‘Marxist’ literary scholars trying to capture texts as social products. And I don’t understand why Lacan is absent from C’s title. For the academy folks, he was much more important thean Deleuze. So what ‘theory’ meant was theory ‘of literature’ or ‘of literariness’ or ‘of textuality.’ Since lit critters don’t know anything else but lit, it never occurred to them that theories have objects, and that theories have properties distinct from those required by their object. As a linguist too, me and my linguistic buddies, learning a field where theory construction gets taken pretty seriously, used to laugh at titles with the unadorned ‘theory.’ Of what? We cackled, of what?
Oops, now it is getting late. After my brief glance and C. I have a few reservations. I got started from the mention of John Cage in the one the excerpts you included. In the pages before his first mention of Cage, C. seems to have a slippery grasp on chronology. I would rconsider Rock and roll and the Beats as products of the 50s, not the 60s. And his underground reception of the French po-mo’s seems to collapse the 80’s into the 70s. Since Cage’s writing and composing spans those four decades, his treatment of Cage suggests some confusions in the account. First he mentions how Cage appealed to the early po-mos. That I believe. Cage tried to escape intention without any European inspiration. Then a retrospective characterization by an academic Germanist and a single article in Semiotext(e) convert Cage into a proponent and practicioner of French ‘theory.’ Toward the close, C. paraphrase his own mentions as ‘la complicite “theorique.” That ‘complicity’ patches over a connection he hasn’t established. I have to admit, I don’t know Cage’s later writings. But he was such a sweet guy, his Nietzscheanism, if it really existed, must have been strange indeed. I’d still bet Buddhism remained much more important conceptually.
Really, really late. It also strikes me as strange that Johns Hopkins appears only once in the text, and then only as example of a private university named for the millionaire who endowed it. Not a word of the important role it played in bringing Derrideanism to the States. An ommission that exaggerates the underground at the expense of the academy. And now I’ve got to go home and start the midnight laundry.
hey chuckie –
just a quick correction to my quotes from cusset. C did spend quite a bit of wordage on the Johns Hopkins conference, and detailed a couple of others that happened later.
my selective bits sent to the lbo discussion list were mostly speaking to a tendency among some lbo’ers to view french theory as some kind of imposition from on high, from outside the real world, imposed on the poor people who wouldn’t otherwise care for such theories b/c said theories, being concocted in the academy, which isn’t of the real world, couldn’t possibly have anything to do with their lives. that’s bad theory.
good theory comes from da people, doncha know. and everyone knows that a good leftist hast to be for the people, always. of course, usually only certain kinds of da people. sarah palin doesn’t count. cause most people, unlike said leftists, are blinded by ideology and end up sounding like sarah palin. but if you look carefully among the gems, you can find the right kind among da people who speak um truth to power and stuph.
alas, i also have to run. oh, and one other thing, that stuff about real world and the academy is taken up by cusset a bit. but he’s subtle about what he actually thinks about it. mostly, i think he’s amused by users’ tendency to posit a real vs unreal world.
and yeah to the irony of the title. i don’t think cusset makes that obvious. i happened to have read it in a piece by scott lemee i think.
oh and one other thing. i totally agree with you about the way cusset writes about the relation between arts, activism, etc. and french theory. when you read it really carefully, to quote david letterman, something smells. more abut that later though
Way late getting back here. Too much work and tiredness. so the blame on Johns Hopkins goes to the schlepp who indexed the book. Cause all I did was look in the index.
I will also fault the editor/publishers of Semiotext(e). They have not even put it up online. So if you didn’t read the original article by Cage, you would have to go through interlibrary loan to get it. What kind of anarchists are those?
You know, in Germany none of this ‘theory’ has had much of an academic reception at all. None at all those twenty years ago, give or take a decade, when I was thrashing around in the apprenticeship. And only maybe a little Derrida since. But there was a activist reception of Foucault by the mid-70s. About one step up from the underground mimeograph. On my bookshelf I have a translation of Microphysics of Power from 1976. Published by Merve Verlag. But the cheapest paperback publishing you can imagine. Back then it appeared in a series International Marxist Discussion!! In the interim, the Marxism has disappeared from the publishers catalog. And the discourse orientation has established itself in some of the (once?) Marxist circles that were most open to the ‘new social movement’ orientation. Can’t blame them for the slow decline of the German radical left any more than you can blame the pomos here.