The Fetishization of 'Theory' and the Prefixes 'Post' and 'After

The Fetishization of 'Theory' and the Prefixes 'Post' and 'After' Patrick Ffrench (bio) Colin Davis , After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory (London, Routledge, 2004), 210 pp.; Terry Eagleton , After Theory (London, Penguin, 2003), 225 pp.; Michael Payne and John Schad (editors), Life.After.Theory (London, Continuum, 2003), xi + 196 pp.; Jean-Michel Rabaté , The Future of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), v + 170 pp. An immediate problem with the designation 'post-theory' or 'after theory' is the question of what is named by the word 'theory'. The word has taken on a status beyond the mere result of the practice of theorizing or the act of theoretical reflection, and in effect functions something like a proper noun designating a rather nebulous entity which seems to cover a multitude of supposed sins. Qualified by an adjective such as 'literary', 'political', 'social' or 'quantum' the word has a specific and identifiable sense. But on its own, 'theory', like other proper nouns, is a word which has lost its semantic content and functions as a synecdoche, as a kind of shorthand, in connection either with other nouns emptied of content, like 'poststructuralism', or in connection with a series of names (variously, in the works under consideration here: Althusser, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Levinas, Kristeva, Tel Quel, Rorty, Jameson, Butler. . .), or in connection with a cultural and pseudo-geographic identification ('theory' is French, a French invasion of the US, or, for Eagleton, American (Eagleton, 186)). The proper noun 'theory', which does not function in France (in an interview in 2001 Derrida maintained that he did not use the term (Payne, 8)), thus has the status of a myth. Roland Barthes describes the myth as a parole, that is, as a discourse, in which the primary linguistic level of signification has been parasitically appropriated by a second discursive order, which feeds off the linguistic signification of the first level but supplements it with a series of ideological associations.1 The connection with the first level of linguistic signification, however, ensures that the myth can appear to derive from the order of literal language and thus appear innocent [End Page 105] of ideological intent. If 'theory' is a myth, then, rather than a practice, mythological analysis would identify in it such implied notions as 'French', 'jargon-ridden', 'abstract', 'irresponsible', 'perverse', 'against common-sense', and so on. Strangely, the reification of the practice of theorizing in the proper noun 'theory' at the same time freezes and masks a historical derivation. 'Theory', as noted above, is not rigid and exact in the historical or geographic origin it identifies. The term covers, according to context and to the intent of those who wield it, the multiple and varied bodies of thought which emerged in France in the 1960s and after, but also in some cases the earlier and later work of the Frankfurt School (see Rabaté, 50–65), as well as the work of thinkers whose work emerged after the so-called 'invasion' of French theory in the United States. The mythic designation 'theory' whites out the precise historical chronology of its emergence, as well as the differential detail of this emergence. Indeed, insofar as proper names such as 'theory', 'poststructuralism' or 'postmodernism' are almost never used in the same way in French, the language in which for the most part they are supposed to have originated, we might suppose that the reification of 'theory' is always after the event. This is to say that 'theory' does not apply so much to the writings of Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault and others, as to their effects. The myth of 'theory' would in this sense always be 'after theory'; theory would always be after itself. However, even if we accept for a moment that this term 'theory' works like a myth, and therefore that it is an ideological and imaginary entity rather than a practice with its basis in the real, it is indubitable that this myth produces effects in the real. Reified 'theory' has real political effects, one of which is to obscure and indeed prevent theoretical practice as such. The myth of 'theory' thus asks for analysis. In the light of the notion that 'theory', whether

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