{"id":2838,"date":"2019-10-07T22:47:14","date_gmt":"2019-10-07T20:47:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/?p=2838"},"modified":"2019-10-14T18:31:33","modified_gmt":"2019-10-14T16:31:33","slug":"the-american-theory-boy-and-his-fetish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/2019\/10\/07\/the-american-theory-boy-and-his-fetish\/","title":{"rendered":"The American “Theory Boy” and his fetish"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a little excerpt from the preface of my book about French radical philosophy, where I try to open up some questions about gender and object-desire in “French Theory,” as we once knew it in America. It’s not the ethnographic part of my project; it’s not even really about France. But it tries to think a bit about U.S. college culture around the turn of the 2000s, when I was a student and when\u2014at my institution\u2014French Theory was still somewhat in vogue.<\/em><\/p>\n

The kind of theory I was taught in college had a big aura. It was a chic kind of theory, a French kind of theory, one entwined with hipster and bohemian aesthetics, with \u201cfemale effacement\u201d (Johnson 2014:27), with things postmodern or poststructuralist, with American whiteness, and with a barely repressed spirit of commodification and elite competition. In the American university context, this theoretical competition was readily entangled with clumsy masculine ambition and ersatz intersubjectivity, as one can see from a late-1990s satirical song about dating at Swarthmore College.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The song, \u201cTheory Boys,\u201d began:<\/p>\n

Comes on the scene in a sharp wool coat<\/em>
\nBright eyes, hair a little too long and big teeth<\/em>
\nWanna strip away the phrases he recites by rote <\/em>
\nWanna find out what\u2019s underneath<\/em><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t want to talk about anything I think I know<\/em>
\nIt won\u2019t take long to see I\u2019m hopelessly outclassed<\/em>
\nAnd when you finally get him home<\/em>
\nHas he got what it takes to last you?<\/em><\/p>\n

One of these days I\u2019m gonna have to get away from theory boys<\/em>
\nOne of these days I\u2019m gonna have to get away from theory boys<\/em>
\nWhen they read Foucault for fun<\/em>
\nThat\u2019s when you know it\u2019s time to run! If they\u2019re so much<\/em>
\nSmarter than me, why do they act so dumb?<\/em><\/p>\n

[Fein 1998]<\/p>\n

Let us dwell on \u201cTheory Boys\u201d for a moment, since its lyrics convey a whole theoretical world. The theory boy\u2019s theory was a prestige object, used not in the service of any collective politics, but as part of a masculine bildungsroman which was nothing if not cringeworthy. In the song\u2019s scenario, the theory boy was a bad boyfriend because he not only thought he knew everything, he also sought to make you feel inferior in the face of his knowledge, distilled from obsessive readings of fetishized male philosophers \u2014 Foucault and, as another verse notes, Nietzsche. Today one would call him a mansplainer, and his ostensibly subversive cultural knowledge was not to be mistaken for actual thinking. On the contrary, it consisted essentially of rote formulas that may, nevertheless, have channeled genuine existential angst. \u201cMan is mortal, life is pointless, God is dead and stuff,\u201d was the summary of his views offered in the fourth verse by the composer, Elizabeth Fein, who went on to become a psychological anthropologist. The theory boy was a connoisseur of yesterday\u2019s philosophical dissidents in France and Germany, and what he sensed as radical chic was really a palimpsest of yesterday\u2019s academic imperialisms, now eclipsed by the United States\u2019 ascendant academic industries. Meanwhile he protected his expertise by avoiding his interlocutor\u2019s domains of knowledge; he privileged his own verbal prowess over sexual reciprocity with his partner; and he aspired to style by practicing Francophile bobo consumerism, notably, as the third verse notes, by binging on coffee and cigarettes.<\/p>\n

Methodologically, the point is that theory was enmeshed in a system of angsty patriarchy and frustrated desire. It was not that the theory boy definitively preferred the literary androgyny of French theory to the embodied femininity of his partner, since being a theory boy was clearly his coy sexual strategy.[1] In the libidinal economy of the song, the theory boy automagically constitutes an object of desire for the woman protagonist. He seems enticing in spite or because of his repulsive and excessive qualities, which give her desire for him a certain masochistic quality. In this, her desire mirrors his: the desire for theory is itself a masochistic desire, because who but a masochist (in this view) would be dumb enough to read Foucault for fun (Kulick 2006)? Just as the girl never gets what she wants from the boy yet can\u2019t quit him, so too, it would seem, does the boy never get real knowledge from Foucault, but can\u2019t stop reading him. The three of them enter into a paraphilic love triangle, where a girl chases a boy who chases a book, which in turn androgynously embodies both the masculinity of philosophical authority and the aesthetic femininity of French culture. Yet all the while, by the song\u2019s account, the theory boy remains oddly trapped in himself, and in his barely intelligible code: \u201cAt least he can speak his own language\u2014no-one else knows how.\u201d<\/p>\n

We could say that the theory boy\u2019s theory becomes a fetish object, in a libidinally charged though not directly sexual sense. The objects of fetishistic desire (paraphilia), whose inanimacy affords them a welcome stability and predictability, can play a powerful function in stabilizing libidinal economies (Berlant 2012).[2] Fetishes serve at once to comfort and alienate, interfering with easy fantasies of subjective sovereignty. For the fetishist is not self-sufficient, he needs the object; he is not in control, but neither is he obliged to swallow too much intersubjectivity, since his desire can be satisfied by a substitute; and ironically, his very lack of sovereignty can make new things possible.<\/p>\n

Now the \u201ctheory boy\u201d is obviously a specific social type, and an idealized one at that. He is not a stand-in for Anglophone critical theory at large; he is neither an Angela Davis nor a Herbert Marcuse, neither a Barbara Johnson nor a Sara Ahmed. But in the instabilities which afflict him as he tends his theory fetish, he represents a political dead end whose implications reach far beyond the narrow confines of American elite college culture. If the unfinished global legacies of twentieth century radicalism show anything, it is that dialectical fantasies of a happy merger between revolutionary subject and revolutionary theory have generally proven unrealizable.[3] \u201cTheory\u201d in its post-sixties sense has consequently often been in a bad relationship with politics \u2014 as my French interlocutors sometimes complained \u2014 and this fraughtness is inseparable from its potential to become an academic fetish object.[4]<\/p>\n

Still, it is not my view, either in this case or in general, that theory (itself a highly historically mutable category) is a fetish by nature. It is merely analytically important that, at certain historical moments, it can become one. Meanwhile, no one would mistake Theory Boy for a utopian: he is too dogmatically affirmative about theory for that, and too hostile to other human beings. But his masculinist fetish of theory has the merit of showing a deep connection between patriarchal desire and the forms of objectification that continue to organize the theory universe. This has been only too apparent to women \u2014 and no doubt invisible to too many men.<\/p>\n

\n

Notes<\/em><\/p>\n

[1] It is an ideological curiosity that French culture is strongly gendered female in American public culture (whether in terms of fashion and beauty products, of Paris as a love space\/object, in terms of France\u2019s military and economic inferiority to Britain and America since the 19th century, or in terms of its artistic and intellectual movements). It is intriguingly compatible with France\u2019s general femininity-for-America that French Theory was often deeply masculine and male-dominated. For more on the ambiguous gendering of French national self-representations, see Cooper (2000), or on gender in French philosophy, Le Doeuff (2003).<\/p>\n

[2] As Berlant puts it, \u201cThe fetish enables desire to be controlled, to be manageable, to be comprehended, signified, and also screened out by the material form. Moreover, the fetish has no uniqueness nor singularity, like the penis; it can always be possessed, reproduced, replaced, and collected. Thus it encompasses value and valuelessness, and construes desire through aggression and protectiveness\u201d (2012:34).<\/p>\n

[3] I think here of the unactualized fate of Firestone\u2019s revolutionary Marxist feminism, or Biko\u2019s subject of Black Consciousness, or even Lukacs\u2019s theory of the revolutionary proletariat (which may not be the Ur-form of this fantasy but certainly traces an extreme version of its failure).<\/p>\n

[4] Aijaz Ahmad comments even more pessimistically than me that \u201cIt is also arguable\u2026 that dominant strains within this \u2018theory\u2019, as it has unfolded after the movements of the 1960s were essentially over, have been mobilized to domesticate, in institutional ways, the very forms of political dissent which those movements had sought to foreground, to displace an activist culture with a textual culture, to combat the more uncompromising critiques of existing cultures of the literary profession with a new mystique of leftish professionalism, and to reformulate in a postmodernist direction questions which had previously been associated with a broadly Marxist politics\u201d (1992:1)<\/p>\n

\n

References<\/em><\/p>\n

    \n
  • Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures<\/em>. London: Verso.<\/li>\n
  • Berlant, Lauren. 2012. Desire\/Love<\/em>. Brooklyn: Punctum Press.<\/li>\n
  • Cooper, Nikki. 2000. (En)Gendering Indochina: Feminisation and female figurings in French colonial discourses. Women’s Studies International Forum<\/em> 23(6):749-759.<\/li>\n
  • Le Doeuff, Mich\u00e8le. 2003. The Sex of Knowing<\/em>. New York: Routledge.<\/li>\n
  • Fein, Elizabeth. 2017 [1998]. “Theory Boys.” Swarthmore College Alumni Songbook<\/em>, 2017 Edition. Pp. 7. Swarthmore, PA: Swarthmore Folk.<\/li>\n
  • Kulick, Don. 2006. Theory in Furs: Masochist Anthropology. Current Anthropology<\/em> 47(6):933-952.<\/li>\n
  • Johnson, Barbara. 2014. A life with Mary Shelley<\/em>. Stanford: Stanford University Press.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

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