LINDA KINTZ

ETHICALLY CHALLENGED: THE IMPASSE BETWEEN POSTSTRUCTURALISM

 AND CRITICAL THEORY

Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory. By Beatrice Hanssen.

THE STUDY OF THEORY would seem to have come upon hard times of late, having been routed by the wildly uninformed attacks of conservative politicians, cultural critics such as Lynne Cheney and William Bennett, and journalists and scholars outside the field, who have a habit of not reading the things on which they make confident pronouncements. In this important book, however, Beatrice Hanssen, a theorist and historian of philosophy, reassesses the theory wars, which she contends are far from over, by first dissecting the way key concepts and terms have been used in these wars with little, if any, awareness of their constantly shifting historical contexts. She does this both relationally—that is, within the broader context of various disciplines in the academy—and internally by examining the two theoretical approaches she believes have been the most influential: Frankfurt School critical theory and poststructuralist theory, in particular Foucault’s discursive histories, or genealogies, and the deconstructive poststructuralism of Judith Butler’s performative theory of resignification.

Along the way, Hanssen isolates various issues that should be familiar to those working in the university. On the one hand, one hears from a variety of directions that theory is "elitist, male-identified, reifying, totalizing, totalitarian, specular, spectatorial, obscurantist, apolitical, universalizing, hegemonic, occidental, imperialistic, Eurocentric, antidemocratic, and violent—to cite just a few of the most commonly heard invectives."   And "theory" is often now used merely as "a placeholder for structuralism or neo-Marxism," as a term more useful for name-calling than for any reflective purpose. On the other hand, as Hanssen argues, although we now seem to be in a period of post-theory, approaches associated with the Frankfurt School and poststructuralism remain widely influential in such fields as literary and political theory, postcolonial, queer, psychoanalytic, and feminist theory, geography and theories of spatial meaning, and many others. The very ubiquity of the term post is itself one sign of the problems addressed by these two schools, for the term suggests a model of history that posits intellectual development as a series of fads that deviate from some supposed universal form of reason. In that model, one could compare universal reason to a body of water, where all disturbances are seen as temporary and are eventually leveled out when equilibrium returns. In this model, one intellectual "fad" is simply over after a certain period of time, to be followed by another, whose disturbances will also fade. This version of intellectual history, however, is contrasted to a theory of history in which no intellectual movement, paradigm, or constellation ever "ends," because there is no such thing as an ahistorical equilibrium of pure reason. Each intellectual movement takes its place well within the ongoing historicity of reason, within the conceptual universe it has altered and upon which it has left its mark.

Given a confusing state of affairs in which theory is diagnosed as having expired at the same time that it continues to produce some of the best work in the academy, Hanssen suggests that it is "high time we take stock of the often covert discursive strategies performed under the aegis of antitheory charges." She notes that, both inside the academy and without, the slur "theory" these days most often refers to poststructuralist theory, the meaning of which is in turn usually narrowed to mean literary theory, thus pitting social scientists against those in the humanities. She likewise notes that the term theory often functions by way of synecdoche, in which one subcategory, such as psychoanalytic poststructuralist theory, feminist theory, queer theory, or postcolonial theory, for example, is used to refer to the whole. "Theory," i.e., poststructuralist theory in general, is also typically identified with a small number of negative givens: the Heidegger/de Man scandal, what Hanssen calls "the trade embargo on things French," and the Sokal affair. And though Hanssen does not address the larger cultural climate, one can follow this demonization of intellectual activity throughout American history, where there is a long tradition of the rejection of Continental thought, of constant pressure on American intellectual discourse from fundamentalist religious concepts of language, and of the condemnation of French thought, particularly in relation to the French Revolution. Those historical impulses, in a variety of forms, have come to the fore with a vengeance in the conservative climate of the present.

But theory faces another problem: an impasse that has developed between poststructuralist theorists and second- and third-generation Frankfurt School critical theorists. Their differences, as Hanssen goes on to show in meticulous detail, are in fact far less serious than the fact that the methodology of their interaction has failed. In particular, her argument attempts to point out the damage done by the crippling and often angry antagonism that currently marks relations between poststructuralists and critical theorists in contemporary feminist thought—an antagonism that plagued, for example, a conference at Santa Cruz, where dialogue became impossible and the poles of critical theory and poststructuralist theory were reified and locked into place as turf wars. Thus part of her project in this book is to help develop a conceptually and historically precise form of dialogue, or agonism, by which discursive exchange might take place without collapsing crucial differences and without falling, yet again, into the nebulous liberal realm of reconciliation or (even more importantly) adopting the dangerous, nationalistic, "strong" Pragmatism of Richard Rorty or a conservative "third way" that flattens out historicity and conceptualization.

Though the title of this review echoes the accusation, in popular jargon, that poststructuralist theory is "ethically challenged" because its relativism makes it incapable of taking an ethical stance, Hanssen’s book is itself a challenge to those who would dismiss the ethico-political force of poststructuralist methodology. Thus, another of Hanssen’s goals, as she turns specifically to the internal disagreements between poststructuralist and critical theorists in general, is to show how conceptual imprecision in the work of both schools—first, in relation to concepts of power, force, and violence; and later, as regards such key notions as politics, antifoundationalism, universalism, normativity, and negativity—keeps them stymied in "an uneasy embrace."  Disentangling that locked embrace in order to open it out into something more productive, while at the same time avoiding an easy liberal reconciliation (I return later to her take on pragmatism) will require an analysis of the "conceptual vicissitudes of violence" from the widest possible range of disciplinary approaches—psychological, symbolic, structural, epistemic, hermeneutical, and aesthetic—along with the analyses of physical force and metaphysical violence we already presume to be important. Because it is a concrete attempt to develop a better methodology for dialogue and because it is so carefully historicized, this is an indispensable study that should be required reading, especially for new students (and others) who automatically assume that the ideas of the two schools are inherently mutually exclusive. For Hanssen draws on her formidable knowledge and her rigor as a historian of philosophy to redefine the whole concept of dialogue by historicizing the impasse, by prying apart its bitter, reified oppositions, and by proposing a form of interaction that is, potentially, an active, performative critical arena. In particular, her provocative description of what she is looking for provides a powerful example of the precision with which she lays out her project:  "When do debate and discussion become a fight, a querelle, and when does a disputatio become a dispute? At what point do argument and argumentation transform into entrenched antagonisms? When we enter the current critical field or arena, do we adopt the guise of the adversary or interlocutor? In negotiating between our different positions, do we give in, capitulate to a supposed antagonist, or are we instead persuaded by the rational force of the argument that our fellow interlocutor presents?"