John Holbo has two posts on Gerald Graff's new book, Clueless in Academe. I haven't read Graff's book, but there's enough in Holbo's posts to be getting on with, notably this description of a move often made by those who claim to defend "(literary) theory":
I accuse Theory of being a puffer fish. When you can see you are about to be attacked, inflate to several times your actual size in an attempt to intimidate the attacker into backing off.... We see the puffer in action when thinkers like Derrida imply that Theory is just philosophy, so that resistance to Theory = resistance to philosophy; and when thinkers like de Man imply that Theory is just attention to the nature of language, so that resistance to theory = resistance to language; and when Eagleton declares these days that Theory is just moderately systematic self-reflective study of a subject matter, so resistance to Theory = resistance to any kind of systematic thinking.
I assume Holbo's referring to Eagleton's recent book After Theory. Just before Christmas, I had the opportunity to see Eagleton deploying the "puffer fish" in person. At a symposium on the future of literary criticism organised by the London Review of Books, Eagleton ran two of the variants identified by Holbo: the one which identifies theory with any kind of critical or "moderately systematic" thinking and the one which identifies theory with philosophy.
Two of the other participants in the symposium, James Wood and Zadie Smith, had talked about the inescapability, for the critic, of the problem of value. "Deciding why a text is good or bad," Wood declared, "is the first creative and critical impulse." Eagleton didn't deny that the question of value was an important one, but for him it was primarily a meta-question: "theoretical criticism", which Eagleton distinguished from "traditional criticism", is not interested so much in the question why x is valuable, but rather in the question what it means to say "x is valuable".
Of course the interesting thing about that is that it makes "theory", or "theoretical criticism", indistinguishable from philosophy, that is, from philosophical aesthetics; from the kinds of questions that philosophers have been asking themselves since Hume got hung up on the "standard of taste" and Kant attempted a deduction of judgements of taste.
(Incidentally, I was fortunate enough to be asked to chair another discussion on some of these issues between Smith and Wood for Time Out London. An edited transcript of that conversation will appear in that magazine next week. It won't be available online, so I may post some excerpts from it here.)
