Is Theory Really That Bad?

The literary Substackosphere is alight with distaste for theory, which, according to various posters on this platform, excessively politicizes literature, takes the fun out of reading, is stupid, and sucks.

I get it. I hated critical theory when I first encountered it because it was so boring and badly written. It uses impenetrable, clinical, technocratic jargon that takes forever to decode and understand. I figured that theorists used this jargon to conceal the fact that they weren’t saying anything at all. They were bullshit artists. As a first-generation student who was insecure and self-conscious about my own intellectual capacities, it felt satisfying to dismiss these pretentious snobs. The reason I couldn’t understand them wasn’t because I wasn’t smart or well-read enough. There was something wrong with them.

Many writers were ready and willing to agree with me. Plenty of Internet commentators warn us to be skeptical of any claim that appears in the guise of “critical studies” or “critical theory.” But some dismissals of critical theory have been more substantive. In the late 1990s, the scientist Jean Bricmont and the mathematician Alan Sokal called postmodern theory “Fashionable Nonsense,” insisting in a book of that title that theoreticians use terms from science and math to pretend to an authority they do not have. The linguist Noam Chomsky argued, with humor and clarity, that literary-intellectual theory was “pseudo-scientific posturing” and failed to solve “real world problems.” French deconstructionists, for Chomsky, were “pretentious” and “simply illiterate.” For those of us who have been made to feel stupid or ignorant by pretentious theorists and the gangly, pedantic, bespectacled young men who love name-dropping them at house parties, Chomsky’s takedown is delicious fun. If even Chomsky can’t understand theory, it’s OK that I can’t either! There’s nothing wrong with me! Many literary critics, too, object to various forms of literary theory on various grounds (see, for example, the various essays in the gigantic 2006 collection Theory’s Empire, ed. Daphne Patai and Wilfrido Corral).

Here, I’m not responding to these claims, which are specific and substantive and often quite correct. I’m responding to a sensibility I sometimes see in online literary spaces that seems to regard the very act of theorizing about literature as inherently suspect and not worth doing.

Fundamental to this view are four basic claims about critical and literary theory, I think. Theory:

1. Has a flawed methodology.

2. Doesn’t help us solve real-world problems.

3. Is poorly written.

4. Is too dogmatically left-wing.

There are grains of truth to each of these objections. But these arguments are not so powerful that we should abandon literary theory. In fact, theorizing is an absolutely indispensable tool for literary study. Unfortunately, defenders of theory sometimes dismiss these criticisms as dunderheaded or anti-intellectual. So, here, I want to try and take these objections seriously but to explain, at the same time, why I don’t find them entirely persuasive.

that old devil…

1. Theory has a flawed methodology

How does someone come up with a new literary theory? As far as I can tell, by just thinkin’, unburdened by inconvenient restrictions like the scientific method, statistical analysis, or the necessity to be, in any simple or literal sense, correct. To write a book on literary theory, scholars basically do three things:

1. Absorb tons of books, movies, paintings, music, etc.

2. Think hard about what they absorbed and develop interpretations or conjectures, revising those interpretations in response to criticism from self or others

3. Argue that those interpretations or conjectures apply more broadly: to a genre, to literature more broadly, or even to the world.

This is essentially, for example, how Erich Auerbach wrote Mimesis.

This methodology—if indeed it can be called that—has some flaws. Literary theorists develop hypotheses, but they generally don’t test them like scientists do, and their findings are sometimes difficult to falsify. The methods are based on reading and creative human thought, two very imperfect methods for the production of reliable data. (A friend of mine who worked in a scientific field once asked me: “No offense, but isn’t what you do basically just making stuff up?”)

Human thought is subject to all sorts of biases. Humans notice patterns or trends where none exist, and we have personal, professional, and political agendas, some conscious and some unconscious. We developed the scientific method to correct for such biases. Without guardrails, our thinking can get too skewed, inaccurate, conjectural, or imaginative.

But, while the looser methodology of theory has weaknesses—in that it doesn’t reveal empirical truths about the physical world—it has strengths, too. This looseness allows theoreticians to tell stories about and argue about big, unwieldy ideas like “culture,” “literature,” and “history”—things which are vitally necessary to think and talk about, even if thinking about them necessarily entails imprecision, elision, generalization. Theorists can think holistically. They can also make wildly inventive claims—sometimes these claims are silly, but sometimes they’re important and useful, too. Finally, theory can pose interesting questions. The goal of thinking and writing is not necessarily to “produce” correct knowledge the way a line cook produces hamburgers. Sometimes, posing the right question is a valuable contribution all its own.

Theory’s also not alone in its loose methodology. Theology, philosophy, history, political theory, sociology, media criticism—these are all disciplines that rely, in whole or in part, on non-scientific, methodologically unstructured thinking. If we condemn theory because it’s unstructured or unscientific, shouldn’t we dismiss these disciplines on the same grounds?

One might respond: critical and literary theory aren’t methodologically flawed because they’re not science—after all, there are many modes of human thought that are valuable but unscientific. But theory is particularly bad because theorists are worse thinkers and writers than other humanists. Analytic philosophy’s OK; theory’s nonsense. But not every piece of philosophy, history, critical theory or literary theory is the same: some are better, some worse; some more rational, some more intuitive; some make sense, others don’t. To make the case that theory is less rigorous than other academic genres, one would need to actually read individual works of theory, then evaluate the arguments and propositions that theorists actually make, then compare them to the arguments that, say, academic philosophers actually make.

2. Theory doesn’t help us solve real-world problems.

Theory does, at times, feel pointless. Why spend all this time engaging in complicated arguments about literature? After all, it doesn’t help us solve real problems. Literary theory doesn’t send medicine to the sick or feed the hungry. It doesn’t do “real” work.

Well, maybe. It depends on what you mean by “important” or “real-world.” The arguments that inspired, say, feminism, were within the lineage of what I’d call “theory.” Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) spends a surprising amount of time reading Shakespeare through a kind of feminist lens—Fuller’s arguments are not just rational and Transcendental but are also dependent on careful readings of poetry, Greek drama, and classical history. It’s a literary-historical argument as much as it is a kind of critical theory. And it was a small part of a big movement that, in my humble opinion, did indeed solve some important and real-world problems. No single tome of literary theory, it is true, will produce immediate, immediately beneficial political or cultural effects. But these texts are part of broader networks of intellectual life that will, eventually, exert influence on the broader culture, which can, eventually, result in real, concrete changes.

But I also don’t think we should only ever think about ideas that we know will solve real-world problems. This is straightforwardly anti-intellectual, in that it doesn’t acknowledge that thinking, writing, and learning is an intrinsic good. But it is also short-sighted because it assumes that we already know what kinds of thinking will bring benefits and which won’t, and therefore which things we ought to think about and which we shouldn’t. But of course we don’t have perfect knowledge of what we’ll need to know in ten or thirty or a hundred years. Of course we don’t know which forms of cultural interpretation will seem urgently necessary in 2040! In the face of this uncertainty, it behooves us to encourage the existence of vibrant, diverse intellectual ecosystems. Sometimes a great insight is reached only by experimenting with ideas that seem, at first, to be silly. Sometimes a great idea comes about only in response to bad ideas. That’s one reason why the freedom to think about a wide range of topics, both practical and impractical, is so important: we can’t tell, for sure, what’s practical and what’s impractical, what will solve problems and what won’t, what is audaciously silly and what is audaciously insightful—at least not without having a conversation about it.

3. Theory is poorly written.

In the early ‘90s, right in the heyday of hyper-jargony academic literary theory, Bill Watterson published this oft-reposted gem:

It’s funny because it’s true: academic writing is often impenetrable, intimidating, and obfuscatory. About a year after this comic appeared in newspapers, the academic journal Philosophy and Literature famously started a “Bad Writing Contest” that highlighted “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles published in the last few years.”

The stereotype exists because it’s true. And although there has been a definite turn toward clearer writing in critical and literary theory, much of it is still too obscure.

Defenders of difficult literary theory will often claim that the obscurity of theory is the point. In order to get readers to think differently, theorists need to write differently, they say. And writing that is truly different and original is almost by definition hard to understand. The obscurity of theory, from this standpoint, is a result of its daring originality.

I think that this argument is basically right; the best attitude to have toward theory is similar to the best attitude to have toward poetry. When I teach reluctant students to read confusing, difficult poems, I tell them to have patience and generosity—to read and re-read the poem, keeping themselves open to discovery and surprise. Only with time and effort can a good reading of a poem emerge.

I also agree in the case of things like history, economics, or political theory: just because something is difficult to understand—or is simply boring—does not mean that we shouldn’t bother reading it. Reading difficult or boring things teaches us to appreciate delayed gratification and to discipline our thought and attention. It cultivates, in other words, good habits of mind, at the same time that it makes us more informed and educated.

At the same time, academic prose has the reputation for being turgid and cryptic for good reason: it often is, partially because writing clearly is really, really hard, especially when we discuss complicated or counterintuitive ideas! Obscure writing can be a waste of time and energy for readers, and I think that theorists have an obligation to their readers to write as clearly as they possible can. As the theorist and critic Toril Moi writes in her excellent theoretical book Revolution of the Ordinary, clarity and grace are certainly nice when we can have them. But, at the same time:

Clarity is not incompatible with difficulty. Some ideas just are difficult, even in the most lucid presentation. As Einstein is supposed to have said: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, not simpler.”…We should stop casting clarity as the opposite of difficulty. The opposite of clarity is obscurity. The opposite of difficulty is easiness.

To be mentally healthy, we shouldn’t only do easy thinking. We should also think about things that are difficult to understand. Learning has a price: feelings of being bewildered, alienated, or confused. Mastery of something truly new can only come after those feelings. Yes, we should acknowledge that some academic writers do use big words to conceal the fact that their thinking is spurious, dull, or uninformed. But this is no reason to simply reject all difficult writing, as if it is all automatically hollow bloviation.

4. Theory is too dogmatic and left-wing.

If we’re being honest, this is the real objection. Critics of theory say they don’t like its methodology, that it is frivolous, and that it is poorly written. But it often seems that the real objection, beneath all of these objections, is that theory is so often a way to discuss and further radical left-wing politics.

It’s true that many theorists have leftist political commitments: this is why we have Marxist literary theory, feminist literary theory, and so on. I would also agree, to an extent, that there are strains of dogma or ideological orthodoxy present in some theoretical writing.

But a point of clarification is in order: the act of theorizing is not inherently left-wing. There are plenty of prominent and interesting literary-theoretical ideas that are not, in any straightforward sense, left-wing. I don’t see a prominent or obvious left-wing valence, for example, in the following theoretical arguments, which have enjoyed significant influence over the practice of literary theory in the 20th and 21st centuries:

• Certain myths and archetypes appear and reappear in a wide range of literary works, and these patterns can be identified, named, and categorized

• Artistic innovation emerges from poets’ psychological struggles with older, more influential poets

• It’s impossible to paraphrase a poem

• There’s no such thing as a “right” or “wrong” interpretation of a novel or poem

In terms of theory, there’s a whole lot to talk about without even engaging in politics.

But what are we to do with the theories that are, in fact, very left-wing, the ones that seem to impose ideology onto texts? These theories certainly exist, and it would be foolish to suggest that the politics of academic theory are not largely left-wing.

Even if you’re on the right, the fact that something is left-wing is not a good reason to discredit and ignore it. Are you suspicious of leftist theory? Then you should read it and understand it! You may very well find some of the arguments persuasive or captivating. If you don’t find them persuasive, you should feel free to criticize them on specific grounds: that they don’t make sense, that they assume premises that aren’t true, that they disregard important evidence, or whatever. But you can’t disagree with an argument you have not read or understood—at least, not while maintaining intellectual honesty.

As it turns out, there is plenty of disagreement, some of it acrimonious, among literary theorists. They are not all on the same side. Some see identity politics as vital and central to any act of interpretation, for example, while others find identity politics to be a distraction from other political issues, while others find identity politics to be intellectually incoherent. If you think that literary theory is too left-wing, and that this left-wing-ness sucks all of the joy out of literature, that’s a reason to join the theoretical conversation with your own ideas, judgments, and arguments—not to dismiss the entire endeavor as intrinsically corrupt.

Conclusion

This past summer, I attended a fancy academic conference full of “renowned” and “famous” literary scholars “doing theory” at an expensive, prestigious institution. While I met many interesting people and heard a few interesting presentations, I spent a lot of my time there bored out of my mind, glancing out of the window into the bright June day like a schoolboy stuck in algebra class. As I failed to understand theoretician after theoretician, I found myself feeling those old emotions: resentful, suspicious, and a little insecure that I couldn’t understand the fancy words that everyone else was nodding along to.

I am sure that some of the theoreticians at this conference were, in fact, bullshit artists, peddling silly and half-baked nonsense. But I am also sure that some of them were genuinely trying to think through difficult and complicated topics, doing their best to present their work in a friendly and clear way, and simply failing to accomplish this extremely difficult task. When I think about the kind of thinker and reader I want to be, it is one who begins by giving writers the benefit of the doubt, who is willing to withstand confusion and disorientation and to be patient with difficult writing. I want to be the kind of reader who does not turn away from difficult or strange ideas, but one who is willing to work hard to understand and engage with them.

I am reminded of a line from the poet Marianne Moore. In her poem “Poetry,” she writes:

“I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.”

If you hate theory, why not try again? Pick a book—I’ll recommend three at the end of this post—and read it, maybe with Moore’s contempt, but hopefully with the sense that you are an intellectual explorer who is open to thinking and reading in a new, difficult, and different way. You may just find that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine.

Recommendations to Start (theory books that make interesting claims in intelligible language)

• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities

• Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

• Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique