The History of Theory Begins
Posted on | July 29, 2005 |
Last night I was excited to attend the first in a new series of seminars being run by our neighbours upstairs, The Centre for the History of European Discourses. Even the name of this centre makes me quake a little in its momentousness, and it’s currently home to some of the most formidable thinkers and lovely people I have met in Australian academia. It was both touching and reassuring to hear Simon During admit just before he began his talk that even he was a little intimidated by the prospect of giving a paper in the company of such eminent scholars as Ian Hunter, one of a bunch of “Brisbane boys” leading the pack in philosophy and cultural studies during the time Simon was based in Australia. I always find it fascinating to watch professors publicly reflect on the influence of their own peers, and especially nice to witness the possibility of genuine respect within a profession that is so easy to view negatively in terms of competitiveness, pettiness and fading will. The need for heroes in the academy is something my book will argue is fundamental for generating the momentum for scholarly practice. And while some people have a real problem with this position, because it assumes charisma can have critical rather than simply affective (hear meaning negative) ends, I maintain that esteem for others is often the motivation for making the new breakthroughs which are ultimately the path to good scholarship.
Ian introduced the seminar series by saying that reflections on the history of theory have so far been characterised by the four Rs: Regret, Revenge, Renovation and Return. These sentiments encapsulate varying positions including statements like “How can we have done it?”, “How can you have done it?”, “Have we corrupted the youth?” (as if theory were the easiest way to do that) and “Why don’t we do it all over again?”. The seminars aim to provide a space free from the simplifications that can creep into these positions, instead asking historicising questions like what theory was, how it was done, and what it remains.
For me, Simon’s talk covered a lot of ground that I knew quite well in that it formed the basis of my first year of PhD research into the emergence of the British New Left. One of the surprising insights of the paper was the revelation that Iris Murdoch had been part of the Conviction collection published 1958, in which Raymond Williams’ famous ‘Culture is Ordinary’ essay first appeared. In fact Simon claimed her essay was perhaps the first written from an English perspective that expressed a ‘need’ for theory. This led to a quite interesting discussion - which I hope will go on in the months to follow - asking why there was no English Foucault, Deleuze, or Husserl, etc. What is it about the English sensibility, or history, that prevents this kind of expansive thinking, this desire for an ethics.
The other main point I found interesting was the description of Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson’s influence on British intellectual life when they took over New Left Review. Not only did Anderson’s different class position contribute to a suspicion of empiricism from this point on in radical British theory, Simon claimed that his editorial tenure with Nairn took NLR from a nationally-focussed, urban-based arty-type journal to an austere, internationally focused intellectual market. Further, in following the tenets of Antonio Gramsci so religiously in much of their writing, Simon implied that this was the start of a new phase in British intellectual life in which arguments came to be controlled by theory - which had the effect of making earlier writers like Raymond Williams look a little indisciplined (or as Simon called it, ‘hodge-podge’).
This made me wonder whether this moment was a particularly vital one in that it marked an immediate narrowing of what theory is, what it should sound like and how it should be used in British Cultural Studies, if not the humanities as a whole. As I think one of last night’s respondents was also suggesting, there is a big difference between applying a discrete theory to a problem (the persistent issue cultural studies faces when it imports foreign theory to make sense of local problems) and coming up with new ideas, new ways of seeing - which through the unique eyes of great individuals sometimes does become the basis for a distinct ‘T’heory. As I argued recently in my paper on theory pedagogy, it would be sad to think theory can only be understood as an object, something to be memorised and regurgitated by students. To my mind it’s better thought of as a sensibility to be encouraged and facilitated. For it’s a way of being open to the ongoing possibility of new ideas.
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