Just Stop

Abstract

Just Stop Sharon O'Dair (bio) In her afterword to H. Aram Veeser's The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism, Heather Love is less enthusiastic than Veeser is about the legacy of literary theory. The promotional material for The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism, approved by Veeser, explains triumphantly that this book gathers together the eighteen thinkers who worked with social radicals in the 1960's and beyond to install the currently ascendant rule of Political Correctness…. Their thinking [has arguably re-shaped the American Democratic Party] and stiffened the backbone of Me Too; Black Lives Matter; Title IX; transgender identity; non-binary pronouns; and—in short—the clear-cutting of traditional hierarchy and privilege, the insurgent culture whose wins the reactionary gatekeepers from Trump and Co. are doing their damnedest to demolish. (Powers and Selig 2020, 2) Love, in contrast, observes, Change isn't always for the best, and these scholars grapple seriously with the ambivalent legacy of theory. This generation profited intellectually but also materially from a strong hit of anti-foundationalism. The rise of theory coincided with the rise of the star system in the U.S. academy and with the destruction of the welfare state. Because of the structure of academic careers, this has led to profound and lasting inequality. Many of the critics featured in this book built their careers during the boom and are still enjoying those privileges. Meanwhile, the infrastructure which supported public university education has been gutted, leading to the exclusion of many lower-income students as well as widespread adjunctification and precarity. (Love 2021, 236) Love is unimpressed, as I am, by the protestations of many of the theorists in this volume that the conditions she describes are not their responsibility, even in part. Alluding to structural problems in academia, as many of the theorists [End Page 697] in this volume do, is an easy way to absolve oneself, as Love implies. But one might make Love's criticism harsher by observing that the star system—and the stars who benefitted from it—fit perfectly within the norms of neoliberal, globalized capitalism.1 And neoliberal, globalized capitalism is what needs to be resisted, which is the point of this brief reflection on Veeser's volume. Last year, Namwali Serpell published "Unbothered" in The Yale Review, about Black life in the United States, about certain attitudes certain Black Americans display, a kind of nonchalance. Serpell observes that "Black nonchalance has long been mistaken for laziness, lassitude, indolence, ignorance." But she argues, Black nonchalance is simply this: a dilation of perspective. You're nonchalant about money and work if you see them in the context of capitalist expropriation. You're nonchalant about time if you see it in the context of a life, rather than a day or a job. You never mistake immediacy for urgency. Late? Late for what? Nonchalance rebukes the rigged proportions of a market-driven value system…. [I]t isn't respectable or woke. No, it doesn't revolutionize or fight the power. Nor does it strive for balance or compromise. It just declines to engage with what it considers to be trifling. This is neither political action nor political passivity. It's style. Nonchalance doesn't step forward or turn its back. It loiters, hangs, leans, brushes past. (Serpell 2020) Serpell elaborates her theme: Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener prefers not to. Nonchalance does not prefer to. This difference might seem semantic, but what I mean is that nonchalance obviates preference altogether. There are no choices here and to pretend that there are would be beneath us both. While Bartleby critiques capitalism by refusing to choose, nonchalance luxuriates in the profound absurdity of capitalism itself—the foolish notion that it gives us real choices, that it ever was a choice. (Serpell 2020). In 2012, Simon During published Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipation. Like Serpell, During focuses on a lack of choice, or rather the collapse of alternatives to what he calls compulsory Democratic State Capitalism, which unleashes "a sense in which history has ended—but not happily" (During 2012, viii). After 1989, one sees the inability, the failure, and the...