Literature in Theory: An Interview with Andrew Parker

Barnett:  I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the transformation of literature and literary theory during the past ten to fifteen years. What we've witnessed in this time is the movement of theory from the graduate seminars of research universities to the curricula of most undergraduate programs. I increasingly wonder if this is a good thing. I find myself haunted by that wounding, but accurate, comment in Althusser's essay on Ideological State Apparatuses that teachers--no matter how they resist--remain complicitous in the transmission of ideology. When students remain, at best, indifferent to theory, the only practical argument one can makeand, one realizes with horror, perhaps the only real argumentis that we should learn it because this is what the kids at Yale and Berkeley are learning. Thus we enter this "Bourdieu in Wonderland" world where one has to learn about how culture is used to exercise power so that one can end up exercising power in one's culture. When one couples this with the clear role theory plays in the professionalization of literary studies and the power game of prestige among universities, it quite easy to get cynical about the social role of theory. What do you see as the political possibilities and consequences of theory? And how do you read the politics of the politics of theory?
Parker: This brings to mind Rancière's recent work. In, for example, On the Shores of Politics, he contrasts the events of 1968 with a conflict in the French school system in 1986. In 1968, he says, nobody read the laws. But you didn't need to read the laws. It wasn't a discussion with the law. One didn't approach the seat of power with the goal of interpreting the law. Whereas that was precisely what happened in 1986. The French government was going to impose a new law that would result, as one consequence, in selective admission to the universities. The students argued that this was a bad law. Not that all law is bad. They assumed the possibility of rational discourse about the law. They assumed that they were equal actors under the law. Rancière suggests that this really creates a different model from the one that Bourdieu is committed toabout schools being nothing but engines of inequality. Here you have students assuming that they were equal to those who make the law and demanding that those who make the law do a better job than they did. For Rancière, if you go from the assumption that schools simply reproduce inequality, that's basically all you're going to get. What if you read student history differently? What if you assumed an equality already? Rather than an inequality that is presumed to exist from the outset?
Barnett:  Do you get this sense that theory is becoming part of the function of power itself? It seems that what's defining "better" schools, "better" undergraduate programs is the presence of theory. How do we preserve the critical potential and not have theory become a descriptive assessment of a process of distinction-making? Thereby making theory part of the means of that process and not the critique of it?
Parker: I don't know if we can preserve this (as if it were pure originally), or if its preservation is necessarily a good thing. My sense is--and this is from the limited perspective of being at Amherst far too long--that it doesn't matter much what gets taught or whether students get theory or not. In undergraduate education, you simply want to get students to deal with opacity, with the limits of their own ability to synthesize material. Theory can produce that effect. It could also not produce it. It depends on institutions. It depends on the theorist. But it's not theory's exclusive role any morein part, because at least for people, say, age 45 and younger, theory really has been generalized throughout the literary academy. It's quite different for those who, like me, are now in their middle agewho never imagined being middle-aged. . . .
I think we should remember, too, that the student population in the U.S. is radically different than it was before theory. Theory has had some role in that. That I think we should all feel proud about. If theoryas a formal subjectbecomes a class marker for students who never before had access to class mobilitywell, that's not such a bad thing. It's not such a bad thing your students know that down the road at Yale another kind of student feels that theory is his/her entitlement, and that they're every bit as good as that Yale student. What would happen if entitlement were generalized? This gets us back to the questions raised by Rancière.
Barnett: I'd like to connect the last question to your current project on Marx. What goes by the name of theory today is in a real sense a flight from theory. It is strangely reliant on what the old notion of a dissertation used to be governed byfind an area not dealt with by the great masters. Thus we have studies of print culture, advertising culture, book production and distribution, etc.
Parker: Then again, the history of the book has been revitalized in recent years by--preciselytheory!
Barnett:  Despite the laudable political motivations, however, the force of the topic tends to displace theoretical reflections. Inspiring all of this, oddly, is perhaps the Derrida-Marx connection, which few in fact want to think through. You have thought through carefully the heritage and shadow of the base-superstructure problematic, and it seems to me that this is what is at issue here. People want to go linguistic but want to have that semblance of a material base. Thus, the mere invocation of the body, for instance, is somehow supposed to provide a material base (that is happily free of the Hegelian-Marxist heritage of universal history and teleology) to one's undertaking. Is thereto turn a phrase of Barthes'a "base effect" that has seduced criticism? And if so, how do we explain it?
Parker: I, too, would want to criticize the use of the phrase "the body" as an attempt, we might call it, to go material. It completely reduces anything like specificity in the most absurd kind of generalizing gesture. I think this is just bad work, of which there's no shortage today. In general, though, I don't feel the need to protect theory from incursions or inroads. Who are "we" that it needs our help? I wonder if your question emerges out of the different contexts in which we were trained. I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago in Comp. Lit. where there was very little Theory (capital T) to speak of. There was Françoise Meltzer, my dissertation advisor, and a group of advanced graduate students who basically taught each other theory. We weren't getting it any place else. It didn't feel like a particularly strong institutional context. There wasn't a body of work that we were responsible for or to. This was in the late '70s, early '80s. When were you in graduate school?
Barnett:  Mid to late '80s.
Parker: Theory may actually have felt more beleaguered when you were in graduate school than when I was. Chicago was able to pretty much just ignore it all. Wayne Booth was still the dominant figure in the English department. He just didn't care about the theory we call theory today. It took a long time for Critical Inquiry to warm up to Derrida, de Man, Spivak.
Barnett:  What interests me is thatby just looking at the program for the MLA conventionyou get the sense that theory has become an aspect of professionalization. And yet one often senses that it is window dressing. It is what seems like theory in order to dispense with theory. We've done that. We can move on. So the strategy now seems to be a very disguised, subliminal attack.
Parker: Window dressing . . . as opposed to what? If the work that theory gets to do in other guises is really powerful and productivegreat. But if it's not, then it's not. We've also read high-theory textsnon-canonical philosopherswhich are, well, boring. Which simply repeat received gestures. Introduce no ripple of disturbance. Whose very existence seems to be perpetuating a kind of theory status quo. I don't want to be in a situation of having to defend theory tout court. There's productive work, original work, and there's business as usual. It never felt to me like I had a divide to bridge.
Barnett:  One senses that there is a suspicion of the merely theoretical. Why the imperative to apply? Not that I'm saying that's wrong. It's necessary. But when one doesn't apply, one seems to trigger a reaction that one is simply by that fact being not political or not really doing anything productive in relation to these other seemingly more pressing social issues.
Parker: But it turns out that this "applied" work generates questions that haven't been asked before. The thing I'm interested in working through in my chapter on Marx and theatricality is the question of queerness, the relationship with Engels, the theatricality the Brumaire represents for Marx--these are pretty close to the predicates used by Marx to describe the Lumpen and the emerging gay underworld in London. For me, there was the shock of realizing that there were interesting rhetorical connections among and between these elements. Part of what I needed to do was go back and read more Marx, read Goethe, read Timon of Athens. These are the literary texts Marx quotes most often, for reasons that are well rehearsed, which make perfect sense given the status of both Goethe and Shakespeare in post-Romantic German letters. But Faust and Timon are obsessed with male-male dynamics. Obsessed with questions of alchemy. Burying money in the ground. This absolutely resonates with the theatrical/sexual stuff that Marx and Engels are reading in Karl Ulrichs (known today as the founder of the German homosexual emancipation movement). To describe their letters to each other as excremental is to understatemassivelywhat's at stake between them. I think of this as theoretical work, philosophical work. Not degraded queer studies as opposed to high theory.
Barnett:  I'm not questioning that. You stand out in my mind as one of the happy few who can bridge what seems to be a gap. There seems to be those who do high theory and those who apply, apply apply. You seem to be able to straddle between the two and interweave.
Parker: Part of this is the serendipity of my institutional setting, where I haven't had to make that choice. Part of it is being associated for almost ten years with the Women's and Gender Studies Departmenta formal joint appointment alongside English, which has made it easier for me to be one person doing the same things in both. Rather than two separate people having to teach only one thing in one and the other in the other. A school like Amherst is rich enough to encourage precisely that kind of fluidity. So it's been a very happy thing for me to be there. (I never thought I'd be saying this.) Amherst is an English department that never went formally through American New Criticism in the way that other U.S. departments did. This was the place that Reuben Brower hailed from on his way to Hum 6 at Harvard, where he'd meet de Man years later. That legacy continued to grow at Amherst in different ways than in Hum 6. Amherst produced virtuosic readerswho continue to read, without much of sense of disciplinary constraint. Theory wars weren't particularly miserable at Amherst. Or at least I came late when the battles had already happened.
Barnett: You mentioned de Man. Do you think the wartime revelations was a parting of the ways for theory?
Parker: For many people it was. Deconstruction got depressed. I certainly did. It really was a blow. I was rereading recently the Responses volume, the two issues of Critical Inquiry, and an issue of Diacritics devoted to this material. I stopped reading them because they were so incredibly defensive. Why were we proceeding as if we have to defend deconstruction simply because idiots were saying de Man was a fascist therefore deconstruction is fascism? But I think now it was for good reason that people felt deconstruction was at stake. In many senses it hasn't recovered. It was the high water mark of high theory.
Yet why did it take us so long to think seriously about history? Why was it a shock that Belgium, which is notoriously difficult to figure out in that interwar period, produced someone like de Man? Why was it a shock for many that de Man was as old as he was? Given, for example, all that we learned from Derrida's Glas and The Post Card, we had tools to think about the relation between life and writing, but for the most part we strangely didn't profit from what we knew.
I'm fascinated today in reading pieces in the Responses volume by Michael Sprinker and Andrzej Warminski, who sound more alike than one would have ever imagined they would. In part, because Sprinker has a laudable devotion to de Man and de Man's work. I think it's fair to say that some aspect of de Man made him appreciate Althusser in a very powerful way. But you see Warminski coming to Marx now, a Marx in some way programmed through de Man.
Barnett:  To turn to your Marx book. Is the focus to turn to the literary within the theoretical? This is what I understand you sayingthat literature is not a phase, not a temporal moment; it is always already within theory. That it is theory's mode of presentation and that which it wants to suppress.
Parker: Part of it is, if you will, at the level of medium; part of it is at the level of the object that Marx discovers. Here I'm not defending Literature with a capital L. This is not the humanist revenge of the notion of the literary as a repository of timeless value. On the contrary, it's strictly the literary conceived in terms of the predicates that Marx used to define it when he was consigning it to the past as representation, as groundlessness. But these predicates show up in Marx's mature writings at moments we want very much to call political but which, in different ways, Marx couldn't credit given the very antinomy between what today we would call the political and the literary. Both at the level of medium and of object you have literature as, perhaps, some kind of revenge of the disavowed.
Barnett: As a return of the repressed?
Parker: In some way, yeah. As a condition of possibility is perhaps another way of putting it.
Barnett:  The questions you raised about Marx resurface then in literature. The question is: is he metaphysical, is he already deconstructive? These are the questions that keep coming up in terms of literature.
Parker: I think literature is also already theoretical. There are the generic distinctions one could make between kinds, of course. Blanchot is not George Eliot. Fine. This does not mean that George Eliot is deluded, rather that an Eliot novel requires a fundamentally different kind of reading. All literary texts are rooted in metaphysics. That's what literature is. Literature is a metaphysical name. No one helps to elaborate that more than Derrida. This is also spelled out in the terrific work Derek Attridge did in Acts of Literature. The question becomes: what exceeds the philosophical notion of literature? Is that notion exceeded only in selected modernist texts? I think it's nonsense to assume so.
Barnett:  This is interesting because I think this is what divides literary theorists and philosophers. When philosophers take up literature they look for literature that exceeds the very ideas of both literature and philosophy. We see this in Heidegger and Derrida. It's the Mallarmés of the world they want to embrace. Part of this division is institutional. The literary critic is often responsible for the literature of a nation or a few centuries of it. Then we come to the question of how we extend, how we apply. But the problem is that, as it's philosophically formulated, one can't apply it.
Parker: How then do we understand the event of modernism? Why can't Derrida be (gasp) wrong or uninteresting about literary-critical issues? Why defend this 1967 notion of philosophical modernism? That's never been the most interesting part of Derrida. Or, perhaps I should say that, as a literature person, I find it less useful. If all you're doing is reading literature to see if it's going to measure up. Again, it's a sort of historical teleologyon the way to Blanchot. Well, what if you're in the 1830s . . . we have a whole century to wait; what are we going to do? I don't knowmight as well read some Dickens. But how? Not by pretending that deconstruction hasn't happened.
Barnett:  I find this useful. This touches on something that defines the disciplinarity of these issues. Part of the reason for the drift of the deconstructive literary critic is that it is indeed the case that Derrida does not have that much to say about literature--in the broad, grubby sense that literature departments have to deal with. What do we do with a literature that is embedded in a different history?
Parker: Absolutely. Again, I think no one got this better and earlier in all its implications than Stephen Melville in Philosophy Beside Itself. Which said that there is something screwy about the projectas de Man was then pursuing itof a deconstructive literary criticism. A kind of adaptation of deconstruction for literary criticism. De Man's later work is not quite that any more. But certainly de Man's early work in the 70s was precisely that.
Barnett:  The argument seems to be that the literary is the medium-conscious moment of the text. And that some texts are more equal than others. Some texts, accordingly, are less deluded than others. These texts then mount a challenge to philosophy because they pose the problem of the medium in its full intensity.
Parker: I always had a sense of bad faith in saying that a text doesn't know something about itself. Or that some other texts knew something more fully about themselves. I never knew how we were supposed to know this. I understand the empowerment the critic wants in claiming to know something the text doesn't. But I always felt creepy doing that and trying to justify "my" knowledge as "its" ignorance.
Barnett:  There seems to be less bad faith for someone teaching Mallarmé or Celan. This just would seem to everyone to be part of the point. People would tend to accept that this is what the poem is about. Whereas there seems to be a twinge of bad faith if you pick up a Dickens novel and you do a deconstructive reading. Maybe that's the point of deconstructive readings of these kinds of texts. For these texts sustain the idea of literature as we have thought of it. So one argument one could make is that it is precisely these texts which require deconstruction all the more. They're the proto-screenplay for next season's Masterpiece Theater. This is how we think of culture.
Parker: Well, I don't divide things that way. As if (this is Eve Sedgwick) culture could be either hegemonic or subversive: who said those have to be our only choices? Hillis Miller on Bleak House assumes the novel is doing the kind of work that a Blanchot récit does. His work was very important for me in graduate school. Now that I find myself years later teaching Dickens, the deconstructive interest for me leads to a very different kind of thing. To some it might feel like a New Historical reading of Dickens. But it seems to me a reading that is made possible with questions that come right out of deconstruction. If you read David Copperfield as a meditation on authorship are you doing something other than thinking deconstructively?
Barnett:  I'm reminded here of D. A. Miller's work. In a few asides and footnotes in The Novel and the Police he makes some distinctions between his version of New Historicism--which is this bleak, Foucauldian vision where the literary is always co-opted by power--and deconstruction--which recuperates literature in that literature is that which is disruptive and resistant. The latter tends to often get denied by a lot of politically minded critics. Is that then a defining feature of deconstructive political criticism, the medium as resistance?
Parker: Maybe it's one place where resistance happens. It's a place where traditional notions of politics or criticism haven't looked to or forbut which is political too. An analogue would be that the university is not the only place where politics happens. But it is a place where politics is going on all the time especially when or because it gets thought of as the ivory tower, the place of no ontological value at all. "The real world is out there; that's where real politics is." We've heard that so often we ourselves may not resist its doxa. But the university is a site, too; the medium is a site, too. Which thereby challenges a notion of the political that is simply formed by its opposition to the cultural, the literary.
Barnett: Would this be a point of connection between more strictly deconstructive literary criticism and these other modes of cultural critique? I'm thinking of gender studies, queer theory, the interest in camp. It seems to follow the same point that the making opaque of the medium, the intense self-reflexivity of the form of communication, is an act of resistance. It seems like a very deconstructive move in a sense.
Parker: Indeed. Whether we're talking narrowly about the medium or not, difference is worldly. These kinds of opacities are all over the place and refuse to stay cordoned off--whether in deconstruction, literature, or the academy more generally--in such a way that the literary is the place where writing can be as foolishly irresponsible as it wanna be because it doesn't count for anything anyway. What's compelling about deconstruction, say in Derrida's version, or Spivak's version, or Barabara Johnson's version, is that difference is worldly. It makes a world.

Conducted by Stuart Barnett at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut on November 18, 1996.