SubStance

SubStance 31.1 (2002) 3-8

Introduction

The papers collected here were delivered at a SubStance conference at the University of Western Ontario that aimed to address the passage of theory from Paris to America, at a moment of intense questioning about the future of "literary and cultural criticism" in academia. The topic, although hardly new, has taken on a new urgency in light of recent political events and issues in France and America, and in light of on-going questions: those in literary studies about the value and role of theory; the ethical problems implicit in tthe overlap, if any, between theory and social action; concerns about the ethics of particular projects undertaken in the name of theory and criticism, and the relationship between epistemological claims arising from theory and cultural criticism, and claims made in other realms, notably the sciences.

Institutions such as theory journals and literature departments often question intellectual trends--what's in, what's out; what works, what no longer works; who draws crowds and who has lost cultural currency. Many people speak of French theory in terms of fashion, suggesting that Americans lust after French theory as they lust after French perfume, French pastry, French cuisine, wines, or lingerie. Paul Valéry recognized the long-standing lure of Paris when he wrote to a friend early in the twentieth century that

Paris contains and combines, and consummates or consumes, most of the brilliant failures summoned by their destinies to the delirious professions... this tribe of uniques is ruled by the law of doing what no one has ever done and no one will ever do. This at least is the law of the best, that is, of those who have the pluck to will something obviously absurd. (cited in Halley, 27)

In a similar vein, one response to the Call for Papers for the SubStance conference was a terse e-mail:

As my general impression is that recent French critical thought is essentially baseless and devoid of significance, usually deliberately, and that it has only been deforming in the minds of North Americans (I am writing from Canada), I have nothing to contribute to the conference beyond this sentence.

Such comments, although entertaining, unreflexively ignore the degree to which our understanding of fashion is informed by works of French theory by, for example, Barthes or Baudrillard. More important, they leave out historical and institutional factors that bear as much upon the US as upon Paris. French theory came to America partly through the journal SubStance, [End Page 3] in a period when many people, especially students, were looking for ways out of institutional restrictions. They did so by questioning traditional approaches to literary history or the uni-directional roads of New Criticism, Formalism, Structuralism and the like. In this sense, French theory has played an important role in various domains--philosophy, history, anthropology and literary studies--for a radicalized student population in search of alternatives to totalizing systems. Althusser, Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, Kristeva, and Lacan all spring to mind; even Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics played in Paris by opening up from an Anglo-American perspective new ways of thinking about familiar problems. Indeed, Culler himself says that one objective of that book was to "revitalize criticism and free it from an exclusively interpretive role." In other words, when we work through issues raised by the so-called "corpus" of French theory, we are forced to take a stand on a whole series of concerns about our relationship to institutions, our refusal of dominant paradigms, even our own quest for a satisfying theoretical "experience."

This has a downside, of course: in a review of the recent Tel Quel Reader, Michael Halley claimed that French theory's will to obscurity and incomprehension is akin to a logos-induced acid trip; that

...the rejection of linear polarization... in favor of circular connectivity... was methodically disseminated by the faithful in 94 issues of Tel Quel published quarterly between 1960 and 1982, leaving subscribers in a state of trance not unlike the American poet taking his imagined leave from an imagined Sorbonne at an...