Theory & Event

This volume is a compilation of selected papers prepared for the annual conference of the English Institute of Harvard University of 1997. Reviewing this text as a “volume” is difficult as most of the essays do not respond in any obvious way to the questions raised in the introduction. Nor do the essays respond to one another. The introductory questions include: the status of the “old/new-left” critique of theory as ignorant of everyday, material life; the political significance of the turn among so many self-identified progressives to poststructuralist/deconstructionist approaches; the significance of the infection of theory by politics and politics by theory more generally; and, finally, how much remains of the literary after the historicist turn in criticism. The essays do, very generally, put on display the contestability of the terms “left,” “theory,” and “literary.” That is as far as I can go in identifying a thread running through them.

That said, the volume includes essays well worth reading. Several are not about literary theory at all, but about secularism (Connolly), legal strategies (Halley), and municipal controls on public sex venues (Warner). We can certainly call these objects of concern “texts,” and therefore suggest the authors are engaging in literary theory, albeit rather indirectly, but I do not see any point in making that stretch. Far better would have been to drop the subtitle and let the essays stand together under the title alone: “What’s Left of Theory?” The double meaning of the title could have worked with the collection of essays in the text as the thinkers each identify with left politics. Further, each essay highlights just how important what is left (as in left-over after materialist, empiricist, and behavioralist turns in scholarship) of theory can be to critical and progressive engagement with the world and its textual productions.

The essays in the collection can be grouped into two broad categories. First are those that look at cultural, social and legal questions. Second are those that examine literary texts for their insights into political questions, primarily, in these cases about sexuality and identity. Included in the first category would be Halley, Warner, and Connolly’s essays and in the latter, Brenkman, Levinson, Nunokawa, and Culler. I will, for the moment, leave aside Spivak’s and Berube’s essays. Spivak weaves in and out of the social and the literary in a complicated fashion. I will comment later on her contribution. Berube reiterates a well-worn defense of Rortyian anti-foundationalism.

As noted above, it could be said that the three “social criticism” essays do analyze texts. The text of Halley’s piece would be legal strategies that use “race” as an analogue for other forms of discriminatory behavior. She is concerned with the ethics of these comparisons, particularly as used by the gay rights movement. She outlines the contexts in which she finds them valid and those in which she finds they obscure the critical specificity of each form of discrimination.

Halley’s concerns are not merely with whether “like race” arguments work in an instrumental sense, but with their effects in the sense of “making up people” — how they construct in unjust or coercive ways the very group they are attempting to liberate through legal strategies. Her article is a very thorough and helpful review of the tension between strategy and principle that anti-discrimination lawyers face as they represent different marginalized groups.

The text in question in Warner’s essay is the municipal regulatory regime instituted by Rudolph Giuliani when he was mayor of New York City. This essay reviews how this regulatory regime, in the name of “cleaning up the city,” drove the public sex culture of New York into evermore dangerous and oppressive conditions of existence. As he critiques Giuliani’s policies, Warner makes what I find to be a very helpful distinction between notions of privacy having to do with anonymous sex and the expectation of being left alone as an individual, and notions of privacy...