I spent some time this morning reading (well, skimming) a mostly fascinating piece from n + 1 magazine. The author is Nicholas Dames and the essay is entitled “The Theory Generation”. Check it out here.
This is how it begins. If you are inspired to keep reading, click on the link above.
If you studied the liberal arts in an American college anytime after 1980, you were likely exposed to what is universally called Theory. Perhaps you still possess some recognizable talismans: that copy of The Foucault Reader, with the master’s bald head and piercing eyes emblematic of pure intellection; A Thousand Plateaus with its Escher-lite line-drawing promising the thrills of disorientation; the stark, sickly-gray spine of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics; a stack of little Semiotext(e) volumes bought over time from the now-defunct video rental place. Maybe they still carry a faint whiff of rebellion or awakening, or (at least) late-adolescent disaffection. Maybe they evoke shame (for having lost touch with them, or having never really read them); maybe they evoke disdain (for their preciousness, or their inability to solve tedious adult dilemmas); maybe they’re mute. But chances are that, of those studies, they are what remain. And you can walk into the homes of friends and experience the recognition, wanly amusing or embarrassing, of finding the very same books.
If so, you belong to what might be called the Theory Generation; and it has recently become evident that some of its members have been thinking back on their training.
My own (comparatively succinct, less, well, theory-laden) take, from a piece entitled “Deconstruction” (excerpted from my memoir) is below.
I.
Il n’y pas hors-texte.
Or, there is nothing outside the text.
If the names Barthes, Foucault and Saussure (for starters) mean nothing to you, it would be difficult to argue that you are missing much. And yet: in the autumn of 1992 I spent more time with these gentlemen than I did with actual, living people. You see, they were all literary theorists, and they were all dead. I arrived at grad school expecting to become more intimately acquainted with some of my favorite Russian authors and dive deeper into American literature.
This happened to be right around the time that Cultural Studies had infiltrated English departments with the fervor of a rotavirus. It is tempting to say I was unlucky in this regard; as it happened, I was also fortunate in ways I did—and did not—perceive at the time. To put it as plainly as possible, if the circumstances had been different, the likelihood that I would be writing these words right now is less than remote. I almost certainly would be, if I was lucky enough, a tenured professor. I also, most likely, would be well into my second decade crafting articles for scholarly journals that not even my friends would read, nor would I, being a good friend, want them to.
Long story short: after initially resisting the jargon, the unending analysis (which was initially like watching a Fellini movie on mushrooms) and the impenetrable pretension, I was, for a time, converted. Once the signifying pieces fell into place, I began to appreciate the maddening method of making molehills into mountains. Post-structuralism can quickly become a metaphysical cult, and once the scales fall from your eyes, you embrace the oddly cathartic notion that there will be a ceaseless stream of scales to be pulled off every day for the rest of your life.
As a result, like a soldier who has spent time on the front line, these experiences informed my subsequent relation to reality. Today, I carry deconstruction like a tool in my trunk anytime I need to change a flat tire in my critical acumen. For a while there I was not sure I would be able to read, much less write fiction ever again. Eventually, I learned how to think without seeing myself thinking, but it took many years to sluice all that onanism out of my system.
What are they after?
I came away from this experience mostly unsullied, intellectually speaking, and am glad for it (the experience and the lack of permanent damage). I came away convinced that, when it comes to art, theory and philosophical concerns certainly have an important place, but not at the expense of the work itself. Perhaps this is why, to this day, I find that actual writers compose the most insightful and convincing reviews and appraisals of fiction (and non-fiction, for the most part). Maybe, if I were to deconstruct my own line of thinking, I’m unintentionally (or purposefully) prejudicing my perspective as the more thoughtful, balanced one. Regardless, academia is, in its extremes, like any cult: it is usually worthwhile to avoid any group convinced they have figured out the secrets of the universe, particularly when the answers involve the creation of more, unnecessary questions.
II.
Toujours déjà.
What are we after?
From the moment my mother stopped living, everything that has happened can, of course, be measured along the continuum of before and after. But being alive, still, I now am unable to recall anything that happened before without some awareness that she is dead; that she will die. This happens in the abstract (the knowledge is there, which doesn’t change the memory, but it alters, however subtly, the process of remembering), but it also affects specific times and dates: I will recall an event from 1998 and some part of me thinks—or is simply aware in advance—how she will be gone in four years. An occasion from 2002 will prompt the troubling question: eight months left; she had no idea and neither did we. And so on.
It gets even more complicated during dreams. And that is only addressing the ones I remember, and the ones I remember remind me that most of us are dreaming constantly, endlessly, every night, creating screenplays and scenarios, concocting future stories while revisiting past mistakes or triumphs or slipping darkly through the glass into impossible escapades—the type that could only happen in heaven, or dreams, or else a Fellini movie.
In these dreams and in my memories my mother is always-already deceased. I am always-already predisposed to deal with her death, just like I can’t remember attending church without the eventual loss of faith, or my post-graduate studies without the abrupt decision to flee the ivory tower, or my ongoing quest to construct mysteries I might solve only through writing.
Mostly, perceiving existence through this lens applies to looking forward as well as looking backward. Knowing, ahead of time, how certain decisions or actions are likely to play out (based on experience, based on characters from books, based on intuition) obliges one to avoid clichés. This insight, a sort of prognostic radar, can be as paralyzing as it is liberating: you don’t want to make any moves that will contribute to a life someone else already lived, but you also don’t want to preclude the fortuity of chance. If you think too much you can outsmart the future, or else become Bartleby, preferring to do nothing in order to preserve the illusion of an unfettered free will.
III.
The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
Czeslaw Milosz, one of the great artists of the last century, was both a poet and a professor. He could appreciate literature from both angles: the creation of it as a writer and the appreciation of it as a reader. Having seen some of the atrocity humankind was capable of during his lifetime, his work uses words to elegize, accuse and above all, to remember. His great obsession was doing his part to ensure that the suffering and the bravery and the cruelty were a little less possible to ignore and forget. His poetry, in part because of its brilliance but mostly because of its restraint, all but resists analysis: he knows what he is trying to say and you know what he is trying to say. It’s more than that; it’s always more than that. Like all the best poetry, the deceptively simple words are fraught with feeling and affect. You cannot, in short, deconstruct Czeslaw Milosz.
I came across a poem of his around 1993 that I strongly suspect would have affected me in a profound fashion whether I encountered it before or after grad school. It does, nevertheless, seem to epitomize—with astonishing clarity and conciseness—what miserable if well-meaning theorists spend chapters and careers agonizing to articulate half as well.
What I know of my laborious life: it was lived…
I don’t need to write memos and letters every morning.
Others will take over, always with the same hope,
The one we know is senseless and devote our lives to…
So the Earth endures, in every petty matter
And in the lives of men, irreversible.
And it seems a relief. To win? To lose?
What for, if the world will forget us anyway.
Poets and professors are ultimately in search of similar things: not necessarily the answers to specific questions but the process of discovering, and interrogating the things that perplex us. It is not the answers or even the questions but the act of investigating: that dissatisfaction; not an act of rebellion or defiance, but an appreciation and, ultimately, acceptance that we can’t know. We can never know but we must try.
This, it seems to a former altar boy and once-future scholar, is the most satisfactory elucidation of what impels us to learn and love and live.
*From a non-fiction work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone.
