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T H E O R Y
It has been said that the New Criticism, with its restriction o f atten
tion to structures o f literary works alone, was a theory suited to the peda
gogical situation o f the American academy after the Second World War,
with its influx o f large numbers o f students who did not share cultural ex
periences or reference points. (This is the well-known move o f holding the
students responsible for the teachers’ shortcomings.) But such a theory is
convenient for teachers as well, who need not worry about their ignorance
of psychoanalysis, the history o f philosophy, the history o f the body, and so
on. It produces its own anxieties, o f course: one must be smart and subtle,
and there is no body of knowledge to be acquired that can guarantee this;
but for teachers it has the great advantage o f circumscribing what they can
be expected to know, and the most general effect o f theory— especially in
its recent unbounded forms— is to destroy this security.
Resistance to theory for such motives makes a good deal o f sense. In
its most benign form it is a matter o f priorities and does not seek to pre
vent others from doing theory. Moreover, just as the resistance o f objects
is a necessary condition o f the possibility o f knowledge— ^we could not
claim knowledge o f something that offered no resistance to whatever we
attempted to do with it— so resistance to theory may be seen as a necessary
force, which calls theory to account.
Although theory today can no longer be seen as simply principles of
critical method but must rather be conceived as a broad field o f interdisci
plinary study— philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, and so on— which in
cludes literary discourses along with many others, when we do bring the
ory into literary studies, this sort o f resistance to theory, which fears it as
an excessive intellectual commitment, can have positive effects. It compels
the advocates o f theory or theories to attempt to show what difference a
particular theoretical discourse or orientation can make: at what level does
it make a difference.^ What if, to take Foucault as our example, we pursue
his critique o f the repressive hypothesis and take up his claim that in fact
the nineteenth century witnesses not a repression o f sexuality but, on the
contrary, an incitement to discourse about sexuality, an increasing propen
sity to constitute sexuality as the secret o f individuality o f the self, defined
in terms o f sexual practice or sexual desire? How does this account o f the
deployment o f sexuality fianction? What sort o f reconceptualizations does
it promote? Foucault himself is an opponent o f hermeneutics, but does
such an account stimulate new interpretations o f novels, or is it, on the
contrary, a hypothesis about an underlying discursive reality that could be
confirmed or falsified by the evidence novels provide?
A certain resistance to theory can make one ask of this, or other the
oretical discourses, whether it serves to produce new interpretations by fo
cusing attention on different issues or by providing a new understanding
of some central element o f the literary and discursive situation. Does it, on
the contrary, make a difference not by facilitating the production o f new
interpretations but by seeking to advance an understanding o f how inter
pretation occurs or how the institutions o f literature and literary study
function in a particular society? There is a good deal to be said for a resis
tance to theory that makes its promoters identify as explicitly as possible
what sort o f consequences a particular theoretical discourse might have so
that its success in achieving these ends can be in some measure assessed.
Otherwise, it becomes too easy for those interested in theory to assume
that the importation into literary studies o f some interesting theoretical
discourse is itself necessarily an advance. Once we think o f resistance to
theory in this way, there is indeed a respectable or valuable side to resisting
theory. It is the skeptical impulse itself, a desire to have something more
fully worked out and, at its best, an alertness to what in texts resists a theo
retical scheme.
But this broad conception o f theory is not what de Man means by
the term— though he begins “The Resistance to Theory” with the observa
tions that part o f the resistance to theory comes from the fact that it can
not be defined or delimited. Still, for him theory is not eclectically inter
disciplinary. He writes.
Literary theory can be said to come into being when the approach to literary texts
is no longer based on non-linguistic, that is to say historical and aesthetic, con
siderations or, to put it somewhat less crudely, when the object of discussion is no
longer the meaning or the value but the modalities of production and of reception
of meaning and of value prior to their establishment— the implication being that
this establishment is problematic enough to require an autonomous discipline of
critical investigation to consider its possibility and its status. {RT, 7)
De Man here takes theory not as systematic and speculative discourse
applied outside the realm in which it originates but as reflection on the
problems o f the production o f meaning in literary and other discourses—
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