Against English: Theory and the Limits of the Discipline

Abstract

of feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics intersect and compete for our commitment, does the unitary term theory have any meaning? As a way of col lapsing the whole range of theoretical discourses into a single (and thereby more avoidable) identity, the term may reasonably be regarded with a degree of ex asperation. At the same time, teachers and scholars do describe themselves as being thereby situ ating themselves within a particular historical conjunc ture, as well as evoking the possibility of identifying themselves with a loose alliance of contemporary in tellectual movements. Departments, moreover, adver tise for specialists in theory and talk of teaching courses in theory, a conversation in which phenomenology, deconstruction, narratology, poststructuralism, and other bodies of theory all seem more or less inter changeable. This collapsing of differences clearly blocks the comprehension of theories on their own terms and makes theory intellectually imaginable only as a gener alized and threatening other. But at the same time it prevents the policing of theory by those uninterested in its specificity, leaving it altogether up to those in the ory to decide the content of theory courses. However simplified the term may be, then, it has a historical ex istence and a certain practical power in our lives. Theory has come to serve as a collective noun refer ring to the interpretive discourses that have rapidly multiplied in the humanities and the social sciences in the last twenty years. Especially in the 1980s these dis courses or bodies of theory have been strikingly in dia logue with one another and, as a result, have been partly defined by the process of adapting to, incor porating, rejecting, or transforming one another's in sights, assumptions, and challenges. Thus there is arguably a discursive field called theory, constantly in flux, that is structured by these affirmations and disputations. No individual discourse can realistically hope either to rep resent or wholly to occupy that field. Nor are the boundaries of