Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

 
An interesting piece on American hostility to French theoretical ideas, over at the Borderlands Journal:

"However, regardless of its trapping, French theory, has had a powerful influence on American thought for more than twenty-five years. French theory galvanized the European side of American philosophy in a way that not even the Frankfurt school had been able to accomplish after the war. Philosophers like Habermas (who was always more popular with analytic than with continental philosophers), and Marcuse, were still far too connected to traditional Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist philosophy, to achieve the level of popularity that thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard, came to enjoy in this country—even if at times, for all the wrong reasons. Explicit in the philosophy of the Frankfurt school was a 19th century Hegelian faith in Reason. No such faith exists, or existed from the outset, in French theory. In fact, one can easily interpret French theory as a response to the despotism of Reason, and the fascistic social, economic, and psychic structures—micro and macro—to which it gave birth. Hence, the American-French series of the questioning of reason....

Claire Parnet says in Dialogues (with Deleuze) that perhaps one of the reasons why Americans never really developed a cultural institution of philosophy is because they never felt a need for it—for philosophical systems. For Americans "philosophical" thought found its way into literature instead, literature being a much more rhizomal and less arborescent form of thinking (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 30). Compare Rimbaud's "drunken" voyage to Whitman's walk through "leaves of grass", and it becomes a question of the relation between surface and depth. In the end Rimbaud had to escape to the desert, to reach an exterior that had been there for the American poet all along."


It's hardly novel to suggest that the differences between a empiricist and analytic 'Anglosphere' and a metaphysical and sceptical continent account for the controversial status of 'theory' in Britain and America. For myself, I've long suspected that Anglo-American irritation with French theory was largely attributable to the fact that culture remained a domain where France retained its position as the central player, in spite of American pre-eminence everywhere else. As Perry Anderson has argued:

"The arrival of the Fifth Republic coincided with the full flowering of the intellectual energies that set France apart for two generations after the war. Looking back, the range of works and ideas that achieved international influence is astonishing... Sartre refused a Nobel Prize in 1964, but after him no French writer ever gained the same public authority, at home or abroad. The Nouveau Roman remained a more restricted phenomenon, of limited appeal within France itself, and less overseas. Letters in the classical sense lost their commanding position within the culture at large. What took their place was an exotic marriage of social and philosophical thought, at the altar of literature. It was the products of this union that gave intellectual life in the decade of De Gaulle's reign its peculiar brilliance and intensity. It was in these years that Levi-Strauss became the world's most celebrated anthropologist; Braudel established himself as its most influential historian; Barthes became its most distinctive literary critic; Lacan started to acquire his reputation as the mage of psychoanalysis; Foucault to invent his archaeology of knowledge; Derrida to become the antinomian philosopher of the age; Bourdieu to develop the concepts that would make him its best-known sociologist."


The problem, as Anderson notes, is that such pre-eminence cannot be sustained independently of a wider status in political and economic spheres that France simply lacked. Forms of economic, social and cultural capital could not be regarded independently. In Derrida's later works he responded to Fukuyama's 'End of History' idea by suggesting that the notion of capitalism as the only possible social system represented a denial of plurality; nonetheless critiques of Western political, economic and philosophical structures often began to seem disconnected with contemporary events and to remain situated within a post-war context. To take the example of Foucault in particular, his work represents a fundamental challenge to Enlightenment assumptions but, as I wrote earlier, is deeply questionable when one considers its wider implications.

I've long pondered to what extent views of theoretical approaches to literature might be different, if the centre of such movements had been St Petersburg and not Paris. During the nineteen thirties the Soviet Union proved an extraordinarily fertile ground for what we would now term theory through writers like Bakhtin, Shklovsky and Voloshinov. A writer like Bakhtin sought to challenge assumptions about singular, unambiguous interpretations of language as much as Derrida did, but lacked any wider metaphysical critique. Originating within literary studies rather than philosophy, it seems to me that the Russian theorists remain more relevant to literary theory than their French counterparts.

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posted by Richard 7:57 pm