T H E O R Y
have grounds, do not have to be justified; they are just what we beUeve,
and when we change our behefs, it is just because we have come to beheve
something different. “Beliefs,” they write, “cannot be grounded in some
deeper condition o f knowledge.”® Now o f course this may be true for such
things as religious beliefs, but if we are talking about the various beliefs
that might be described as the principles, criteria, and premises at work in
people’s discussions o f literature or other texts, these are precisely the sort
o f beliefs that are based on knowledge, for which we can give reasons, and
about which we can argue: for example, the “belief” that unity is a prin
cipal criterion o f the excellence o f a work o f art, or that the history o f the
reception o f a work is a key to its significance, or that one should attend
to the representation or nonrepresentation o f gender or o f race in any dis
course one is studying. Such beliefs or theoretical views are not ground
ed in demonstrable truths, but they are not ungrounded either— they are
connected with a great deal o f knowledge and reflection, which is precisely
the realm o f theory.
I f we were to shift focus from theory to beliefs, we would have to ask
how beliefs are connected with each other and to these various bodies o f
thought we now call theory. We would need to ask what in the realm of
criticism leads us to change our beliefs (or theoretical perspectives), and
the answer doubtless would often be theoretical arguments and the illus
trative examples that buttress them. In short the antitheory theory has no
consequences, as BCnapp and Michaels repeatedly claim, not because aban
doning theory as they demand would have no effect but because the ac
ceptance o f their conclusions would leave all the work o f theory still to be
done, albeit in more awkward conditions and under different names. This
kind o f resistance to theory seems to me a dead end, whose notoriety is ex
plained only by the attractions o f the idea o f an end to theory.
More widespread is a different sort of resistance, which sees theory as
an elaborate, elitist imposition, an intimidating mass o f difficult material
which, people are told, they must master before they can presume to speak
about literature. “What! You haven’t read Lacan! How can you talk about
the lyric without taking account o f the specular constitution o f the speak
ing subject?” Or, “How can you write about the Victorian novel without
using Foucault’s account o f the hysterization o f women’s bodies and de
9. Kiiapp and Michaels, “Against Theory,” 738.
ployment o f sexuality and Spivak’s demonstration o f the role of colonial
ism in the formation o f the metropolitan subject?” The worst thing about
theory these days is that it is endless. In the days o f Wellek and Warren one
had to know that a literary work was a set o f norms— not the experience o f
the author, not the experience o f the reader, nor an object given once and
for all— and a few other things as well. But today— this is the leading char
acteristic o f modern theory— theory is not a circumscribed body o f knowl
edge that one could master, even if one wished to. Theory presents itself
as a diabolical assignment o f difficult readings from fields one knows little
about, where even the completion o f an assignment will bring not respite
but further more difficult assignments. (“Ah, but have you read Éizek on
Lacan and Hitchcock?”) There are no limits to what thinkers, from vari
ous fields, may be constituted as theorists, and there are always new theo
rists being invented or promoted by the young and the resdess, along with
the old chestnuts, so we can’t be sure whether we “have to” read Jean Bau-
drillard or Julia Kristeva or Slavoj Zizek or Giorgio Agamben or Alain Ba-
diou— the last two 2005’s candidates for important theorist.
But the point is a serious one; one may resist theory because o f the
fear that to admit the importance o f theory would be to make an open-
ended commitment, to leave oneself in a position one could never master,
whose very nature is simultaneously to present mastery as a goal (you hope
that the theoretical reading will give you the concepts, the metalanguage,
to order and understand the phenomena that concern you) and to make
mastery impossible, since theory is itself the questioning of presumed re
sults and o f the assumptions on which they are based.
O f course, this unmasterability o f the domain is true in literature
these days as well; one can no longer be quite sure what it is acceptable not
to have read. It used to be reasonable for teachers o f English in the United
States to have no interest in or knowledge o f Canadian literature, for ex
ample, but now— at least in some places— our students suggest that this
is very provincial o f us and that an English department has to cover world
writing in English. The convenient thing about the canon, one might say,
was that you knew what to feel guilty about not having read— that you had
never finished The Fairie Queene, or Finnegans Wake, or War and Peace—
but you didn’t have to worry about The Wide Wide World or The M an in
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