The Survival of Theory

Sir,
Three meta-cheers for the excellent letter from John Lucas (PNR 101) awarding two cheers to the first of my pieces on 'The Survival of Theory'. Lucas is quite right: more needs to be said about the a etiology of Theory and its epidemic spread through Humanities departments world-wide. His own suggestions are an excellent start. Once post-structuralism etc. has been banished to the pathology museum where it belongs, it will be important to conduct a post mortem as to how and why such 'thought' acquired a dominant position in so many reputed centres, since it would be a pity to have to start all over again with something even more daft.

My own view is that Theory, that claims to be at once all-encompassing and absolutely fundamental, holding out the possibility of a comprehensive intellectual revolution, even a transformation of human understanding, would be bound to appeal to critics who feel deeply dissatisfied with the status of their profession. When such Theory has the added virtue of being couched in opaque language making it accessible only to the cognoscenti and seemingly making it immune from evaluation - its appeal must be irresistible. For some, a corpus of jargon is a satisfactory substitute for the body of established knowledge and continually reformed practice that gives professions such as medicine or engineering their status.

Whether or not this is an adequate explanation of the appeal of Deconstruction and other modes of post-modernist wanking, it is deeply sad to think that lousy purveyors 'of quack Theory should devalue the excellent and useful activities of those critics who serve books rather than themselves and undertake the traditional tasks of scholarship and commentary. I speak as a lay reader who is immensely grateful for the labours of traditional critics. Reading, especially for those of us who are not academics in Humanities departments, is an essentially solitary pastime. Often, after finishing a classic work, one is hungry for a more intimate understanding of the book, or a widerknowledgeof its context. For this reason, it is enormously satisfying to engage in dialogue with a critic who has thought long and hard and intelligently and sympathetically about it. That such critics should feel invalidated by the wild and empty claims of the post-Saussureans is deeply depressing.

No cheers, alas, for Adam Roberts' letter - except, perhaps, one cheer for geniality, though, as I shall explain presently, I am not sure that the spirit of fun that informs his letter is entirely appropriate.

Roberts correctly points out a proofreading slip - 'self-refuting' is on one occasion spelt 'self-refutating' - but otherwise fails to score. With breathtaking carelessness, he overlooks that the second and third of my statements are in the conditional mode. Yes, I did say that 'the most important ideas in post-Saussurean theory are mistaken'. But I then went on to say that (a) even if they were true, they could not be promulgated without self-refutation and (b) even if they were true and could be promulgated without self-refutation, they would not have any implications for literary theory or criticism or any specific human activity etc. The 'if' on both occasions signals a counterfactual conditional and the verb in the apodosis following the counter-factual protasis is thus in the subjunctive not the indicative mode. In order to sustain the analogy between my position and that of the boy who claims not to have broken the window with his cricket ball and, at the same time, that the window was already broken when he threw the cricket ball at it, Roberts has to change the mood of my verb. Such 'close reading' may, however, be alien to those who have much larger fish to fry.

Roberts argues that just because I have shown Derrida's fundamental arguments to be false, I should not conclude that everything Derrida said is wrong and that, conversely, his own interest in Derrida does not imply endorsement for everything he said. Both of these assertions are banally true. I am sure that Derrida has made some true statements from time to time - if only by accident. If you fire enough buckshot in the dark, you might hit a mosquito's legs. But there is enough falsehood in Derrida on matters of importance for me not to wish his works to prosper. I feel the same about L. Ron Hubbard whose scientological writings, though false where they are novel, do entrain some banal truths.

Nor can Roberts be allowed to get away with implying that my argument is purely ad hominem. Of course, I mention the names of individual authors - otherwise my critique would lack reference. But the authors I mention are representative of the intellectual trends with which they are associated and not one-off madmen. And much of my critique of the attitude of post-Saussurean intellectuals to the Gulf War was endorsed by Christopher Norris' Uncritical Theory. Norris can hardly be described as being out of touch with the overall thrust of Theory. It was not I but Norris who saw Jean Baudrillard's article entitled 'The Gulf War Has Not Happened' as being symptomatic of post-modernism. Let me quote from the blurb on the back of Norris' book:

[Norris] argues that this school of thought is incapable of making any statement about truth and ethics. He reviews the writings of Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and Baudrillard, as well as the American neo-pragmatist school as represented by Rorty and Fish, and meticulously examines the flaws in their arguments.

The ethical impotence of Derrida's writings was eloquently illustrated by his response - and that of his fellow deconstructionists - to the posthumous discovery of de Man's collaborationist, anti-Semitic war-time articles. This response has been brilliantly documented in David Lehman's Signs of the Times - which should be required reading for all those who feel that deconstruction is harmless fun. Derrida had the moral blindness and temerity to suggest that a condemnation of de Man would 'reproduce the exterminating gesture'. It is difficult to know which is more sickening: the suggestion that those who criticised de Man were no better than the Nazis engaged in extermination: or the use of the word 'gesture' in this context -as if the murder of six million people were a kind of gesture. What many people are simply unable to grasp is (to quote Lehman) 'the dangers that ensue when metaphors substitute for facts, when words lose their meaning, and when signifiers and signifieds part company, with the deconstructionist's blessing'. Once you start declaring lucidity to be a dangerous rhetorical ploy and assert that 'meaning is Fascist', you have played into the hands of those, such as de Man, for whom a refusal to recognise the extra-textual referent of discourse was of such personal strategic importance.

'Why spoil the fun?' Roberts asks. I hope he can now see why. The damage done by Derrida et Cie. is limited only by the fact that only he and a few others actually believe the notions that he has put into such wide currency. Most of the thousands who refer to his ideas and 'take them on board' as 'intellectual equipment', 'critical tools' etc. do not really believe them in daily life - reinforcing Trilling's observation that 'it is characteristic of the intellectual life of our culture that it fosters a form of assent which does not involve actual credence'. The intellectual, political and above all moral nullity of post-Saussurean ideas is offset by their inapplicability to real life.

To speak both ab and ad hominem for a moment, it is perhaps less difficult for me, as a hospital doctor, to see the emptiness of deconstruction than for post-doctorates passing their working hours in libraries and seminar rooms talking high order abstractions. It is easy to be relaxed about the truth or falsity of post-Saussurean theory when one is 'lost in the funhouse', less easy when one is faced day in and day out by patients with very real sorrows expressed in sentences that have real referents ('I am short of breath', 'I have a pain in my back', 'There is blood in my motions') and when one's ability to respond to these sorrows is sometimes limited by lack of resources - resources gleefully wasted by onanists in the funhouse training students to swallow and 'work with' ideas neither they nor their students call really even think. 'Long may Raymond Tallis frolic in the playroom of his indignant critical imagination'. No, Mr Roberts, that's where I am coming from.

RAYMOND TALLIS