My Years of Theory: A New Series

Yep, I'm going to work through a bunch of heady abstract philosophy, starting with Being and Nothingness.

I will run this new series alongside my French New Wave series. I do not know how much interest there is in this, and I imagine this one will be more informal, but I have an increasing impulse in my life to share my intellectual work in some capacity, although I’m not finding academic publishing to be a rewarding route.

People who know me know I’m a “theory” guy. I have been one since college, and it’s stuck with me for most of my life. I’ve never thought of it as the main thing I do, as a scholar or teacher. “I’m a Literature professor! I teach novels, poems, and writing skills! When I do formal research, I write about literary texts and history, all this theory is a bit of an indulgence,” I say. “Besides, who can even read or understand this stuff besides intellectuals with too much time on their hands?” But when I look back at my education, my various research projects, even how I approach writing about literature and film, I realize I can’t avoid my fairly deep and extensive grounding in theory. I also think, from conversations with friends who don’t regularly read theory, and from my teaching, I’m fairly good at explaining theory in relatively plain language—or at least approaching something that opens the highly specialized vocabularies of theoretical texts to undergraduates and any curious people. So, I wanted to start a project helping make theory more accessible and also demonstrating why I’ve found it such a compelling and useful set of texts to think with for some 20-odd years. And why, despite its intellectual marginalization in that period, both inside and outside of the academy, I think it’s deeply relevant for our times.

Let me explain what I mean by theory. Roughly, this might mean “literary theory,” or “cultural theory,” or “film theory,” and what I am talking about certainly includes those categories. But often, people can use “theory” to mean something a little more capacious that bridges certain traditions of philosophy to cultural and political analysis. Let me offer a snapshot of the public history with this stuff, and then a personal one.

In the U.S./Anglo university system, there is a much remarked upon split between what’s known as Analytical Philosophy and Continental Philosophy. Analytical philosophy is a tradition that I’ve puttered around with, but have no real education in. It can approach becoming a sort of mathematical science of logical propositions, although there is also an ordinary language branch that is more concerned with what speech utterances do in the world rather than the logical foundations of their claims. Overwhelmingly, this is what dominates U.S. philosophy departments, and I’ve just never spent any time studying in one of those. Other than a little of the ordinary language stuff, it has not interested me.

As far as the U.S. academy is concerned, Continental Philosophy is the poor cousin. This refers to traditions like phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory that are thought to be less rigorous, more poetic and confused, or simply debunked by analytic philosophers. It is called continental because a lot of the major figures are French or German.

Perhaps because I don’t have the analytical mindset capable of adjudicating the validity of Marx’s labor theory of value, I find continental philosophy richly fascinating. Because it has been expelled from philosophy departments, the people in the U.S. who work on it are usually in Comparative Literature departments (although not always) and, because they are in those hybrid spaces, the work can slide into cultural theory and analysis and things like queer theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory. Also, aesthetics and poetics are major interests of many important continental philosophers, so the cultural analysis comes naturally. This blurry space of cultural theory, continental philosophy, Marxism, queer theory, and critical race theory is what I am referring to as “theory.”

I have been educated in some of the last major places for doing “theory” professionally and academically in the U.S. It may seem quite strange that I have not thought of myself as a theorist. But there’s a strong prejudice against theory nearly everywhere, in analytic philosophy departments and, perhaps surprisingly, in English departments. There’s growing resentment of it for taking us away from literature, for being too political, and as a creation of removed elites not working in the trenches of the heavy teaching loads most of us have, even if many departments still have a theory course here and there. The New York City-centered literary and publishing world has long hated it and the academics who pursue it for a whole host of reasons, some fair and some pathological, which I don’t care to adjudicate now. I learned to sell myself as an English teacher and keep the theory quiet because, otherwise, getting a job was probably hopeless. The kids aren’t reading Derrida; no one needs anyone to teach it. Even work with those theories that seem addressed to hot-button cultural political topics (say queer theory) won’t open many employment doors unless you are a superstar.

As a note, theory is usually understood as “leftist” in the U.S., but this is not universally true. There are conservative and liberal thinkers who work in the space of theory, although they might deny that title. There are conservative Heideggerian and hermeneutics professors (I studied with one) and liberal existentialist feminists (I took a seminar with one). One of the biggest French theorists of our lifetimes is a neoliberal. No, not Foucault—I’m talking about Bruno Latour. I certainly affiliate most strongly with left Marxist traditions, but I value all of this work, as do, I think, most people who are serious about it. I also don’t feel the need to fight for turf, claim one tendency, and argue against the others. None of us are getting funded, might as well keep an open mind.

Now, a little personal history. I hope this doesn’t come across as merely namedropping or credentialism. When I was thinking through this history of mine, I realized how silly my disaffiliation with theory is, a denial of my luck, privilege, work, and experience that keeps me from sharing it properly. This is me owning it, and the people and texts that got me here. Some people might recognize these names, most will not, but it matters to me that I had this experience and heard these people think out loud.

I did my B.A. at NYU, where I studied English and Cinema Studies. Both of these departments had been major producers of theory, and I wound up working with the philosophical and cultural theory texts of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This resulted in a senior thesis that was a Deleuzian reading of the brand-new, at the time, Thomas Pynchon novel, Against the Day. I also engaged with Marxist critiques of postmodern aesthetics and culture in that paper, most notably the work of Fredric Jameson.

This thesis got me into a couple of theory-heavy graduate departments to pursue my Ph.D. in English. I wound up going to one of the more famous (or infamous) theory-minded graduate schools, Duke University. But before heading off to grad school, recognizing that the French theory I was working with came at the end of a line of centuries of philosophy I did not know or understand, I started reading in the history of Continental Philosophy quite seriously. I took a night course on phenomenology at the New School and had my first serious encounters with Husserl and Heidegger.

Off to Duke, where I immediately enrolled in a seminar with Fredric Jameson himself (on global modernisms) and a course on the theory of time consciousness in phenomenology and cinema (back to Husserl and some Maurice Merleau-Ponty). I also took an excellent seminar reading the entire works of Herman Melville, recognizing I needed a literary field to teach in.

I kept going, trying to balance getting myself grounded in a literary field with my excitement at being at this place with all these amazing theorists, taking classes all over the place. I took classes with major theorists of the postcolonial in Africa (Valentin Mudimbe and Achille Mbembe), and I kept going back into the continental traditions with a course on the relationship between Romanticism and Kant (and we read a lot of Kant). I got Nietzsche and Hegel from both sides, with another class with Jameson on Nietzsche, Wagner, Adorno, and the philosophy of music (the left), and a class from a German born hermeneuticist named Thomas Pfau on Hegel, Goethe, Nietzsche, Alastair McIntyre, and Gadamer (thus more conservative). I took a narrative theory class with a member of the Oulipo experimental fiction group, Anne Garreta. I enrolled in a multiday seminar with Toril Moi reading through Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and I started TAing for two major theorists of Black Studies and the Black Atlantic, Fred Moten and Ian Baucom. I read Baucom’s excellent Marxist interpretation of Black Atlantic history, Specters of the Atlantic with Moten and had my mind blown. I also took a seminar on Judith Butler and Octavia Butler with Moten. And beyond those classes and seminars, I met and copy-edited Slavoj Zizek for a theory journal. I worked a Romanticism conference where Jacques Ranciere was the keynote speaker and chatted with him at the after-party, and I went to work-in-progress seminars at the house of Katherine Hayles. I even had dinner at the house Bible scholar, Bart Erhman, and sampled a drop from his whiskey closet, but he wasn’t there, so shush, don’t tell him (friends were housesitting).

It was an overwhelming and heady time, a real whirlwind, and trying to figure out how to write coherently about all this stuff was probably the hardest challenge of my life. I do not think I succeeded until I was getting close to finishing my dissertation. But, I was getting better at talking about it and explaining it to friends, and my fellow grad students often came to me when they had questions about Kant or Heidegger.

When it came time to study for my qualifying exams, I was lucky enough to be in a program that let me do whatever I wanted so long as I had faculty willing to advise it. I had to pick a major field and two minor fields. I wound up doing 19th-century American Literature as my major teaching field with my excellent mentor and eventual dissertation chair, Priscilla Wald. But I went heavy on the theory in my minor lists. I took on an Aesthetic Theory list with a demanding and rigorous Thomas Pfau, covering everything from Longinus on the sublime to the Frankfurt School (passing through Kant and Hegel again on the way). And I did a Black Atlantic list with Fred Moten that focused on a mix of Black Studies theoretical texts from the U.S. and postcolonial theorists from the Caribbean and Africa. This was, all told, a stunning education. and an amazing way to spend my twenties. I have to remind myself it was real sometimes, as I look at my happily low-key teacher Dad life now.

I somehow found a dissertation topic that brought these quite disparate things together. I think it more or less worked and added something to 19th-Century American Studies. Perhaps some other time I will explain what that was. But I also never got a tenure-track job, and if there’s a reason beyond the awful job market, it’s probably because of how hard it was to make all this legible in an English department that wasn’t a theory hothouse (of which there are very few). I figured out how to sell it eventually, and I’ve published articles and even got invited to give a talk on it in Germany. But my Ph.D. went stale before I got there, as they do after 4 years or so of contingent teaching, and until I get a book out, that’s probably my fate. In some ways, I no longer mind, I’m a weird hodgepodge of an intellectual, and I feel a little more freedom in my current posting than I might under publish or perish deadlines.

So, there is a pretty deep history of studying and writing on continental philosophy and cultural theory in my past. I’ve never felt like an expert in it, but I have to acknowledge I have some significant training and cannot pretend to be merely a curious amateur. However, in my current life, I rarely talk about it or engage with it, except for fun. I teach undergraduates in an English department. There’s no sensible place to put Kant’s Third Critique on my syllabus, and I’d bore my students to tears. I’ve found occasions to bring in a little Franz Fanon here and there, but I think my students were more into that because we watched the film The Battle of Algiers than trying to work through parts of Wretched of the Earth.

I still read theory when I can, when I can find the time and focus to work through these texts. I think they have huge value in thinking through our place in this world. And because I’m not doing philosophy professionally, the value to me is much less about whether or not my hodgepodge of influences is fully analytical sound in a way that might past muster with an academic audience, and more in finding resonance and clarity about some problem I see in the culture or political world today or in the complexities of my own existential, phenomenological, historical, psychological experience. I simply ask, “Do I feel like I’m gaining insight into the conundrums rattling around in my brain because the world is such a chaotic place?” I almost always find “theory” valuable in this way.

Part of what I’m trying to express here is that, despite being far from my years of theory, despite not formally producing it or being included in any intellectual community, I have continued to “do theory.” But only for myself, in the margins of books or in my brain or conversations with my partner or some close friends. But if I really think this stuff is valuable to the world, I no longer find that adequate. It’s too selfish and inward. I’ve been lucky and privileged enough to have had all the experience and I just keep it to myself? Having turned 40 this year, I feel more and more impulse to get my intellectual work out there in some form or another, to build and add value to the world, to invite more people in. I need to own this past so I can be less selfish with it. And realize I can do this without jumping through the academic publishing hoops.

For now, the idea is just to share commentary on my reading. If I’m working through a tough theory text, I will be transparent about my challenges with it, the insights I’m getting, and whatever past learning I’m calling on to make my way through it. I’m very far from those heady grad school days. I’m not part of that circle of thinkers in any way; I’m just a teacher trying to make a living. But I was lucky enough to get such an enormous amount of exposure to something I think is profoundly worth studying, and I want to share it.

Right now, I’m working my way through Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness for the first time. There’s something a bit embarrassing about this. It’s not exactly a well-respected text, even in continental philosophy circles. It has been passe, marked as for angsty teenagers and hipsters, for a long time. But it is a text that was written almost entirely while Sartre was living through the Nazi occupation of France. At the level of phenomenological description (I’ll explain in another post what this means), I think it expertly captures some of the conundrums we are facing again as the political order throughout the West descends into something illiberal and authoritarian. Sartre is, surprisingly, helping me think in powerfully orienting ways about the question “how do we live now?” And I think that is worth sharing. It doesn’t have clear political answers, but it does have some of the right questions about how to act in situations of extreme contingency. It’s a place to start.

I’m going to try to write as I read, to demystify the process of reading difficult texts like this, show where I’m struggling, and demonstrate how I piece meaning together piece by piece. My approach to reading theory is always to try to inhabit the text—I want to understand the way this thought is working, what it’s opening up. And if I don’t understand something (as happens often), I assume I am missing it, not that the text is flawed. I want as full an image of the thought expressed in the text as possible. I may, subsequently, find flaws, have questions, feel let down, rebel, or resist against something. But I try to “bracket” that for a bit, set it to the side, and go with the text until I’ve gotten through a big portion of it.

I think for my next post, I will explain more why I picked up Sartre in the first place, particularly why his idea of “Bad Faith” was resonating for me in a new way. And then I will go through the text section by section. When reading theory and philosophy, people do not always read texts cover to cover, but at this point in my life, since I don’t have any publication deadlines or due dates regarding this material, I am more inclined to a cover-to-cover approach. That will take a while. Being and Nothingness is 700 pages of technical philosophy, with a fleet of neologisms that are only partially translatable from the French. But I’m fine with this being a slow series, focusing on a single work for weeks or months at a time. I hope it is of use to anyone! And please read along, I will try to give more warning in the future about announcing the text I will be working on, and may expand to hosting conversations on what I’m reading if there’s interest in reading along. And if not, I will at least get the benefit that, in trying to explain something, I always understand it better.