Now it may be expecting a bit much for a life-long statesmen to publicly express genuine doubts about the manifest deservedness of his country or anything, especially in the face of this white kid (with dreadlocks, I seem to recall), but bear in mind that the audience was clearly with the kid, as up until this point the talking/selling points––carefully gauged as just barely self-effacing enough to entice but not appease (for lack of a better word) the liberals–– had been fairly unchallenged.

MacNamara’s evasive response ran precisely: “well, hegemony is a difficult term to define, really…” In short, he was comfortable just to infer that the kid the smug and lazy, whether he (the student) realized it or not.

My point, I suppose, is only that there is a larger political context and greater stake to these positions of argument vis-a-vis Theory as “institutional edifice”, and in the absence of careful qualification, maybe nothing less than an entrenched and latent conservatism.

Let’s face it, those most likely, for whatever reason, to question authority, to challenge the ediface of political speech, will sometimes be smug and lazy, and this is perhaps unfortunate (especially if it never matures into something more responsible). But one has to wonder, I think, whether the experiences that may have brought them to this initial skepticism, the precocious theorizing, the self-taught reading, maybe a bit of international, inter-economic class travel, or whatever, haven’t given them some reason to feel slightly vindicated in their (let’s say) cynicism.

So what is this “smugness” you talk about, really? Is it just laziness, pure and simple, or are things a bit more complicated perhaps? There is no doubt many of the claims anti-Theorists make, on a rather abstract and dehistoricized level, are true, as in logically defensible. But the seeming lack of desire on the part of anti-Theorists to qualify their position (or, what amounts to the same thing maybe, excessive qualification) risks making this debate over teaching Theory less genuinely open than an elaborate defense (one painstakingly seeking to immunize itself from every angle in advance) of a certain set of priorities (namely, Anglo/analytic and liberal).

But I’ve rambled on long enough.

But do we really nead a book to tell us that?

I suppose the answer to that question depends on the extent to which “High Theory” was truly different, and to the extent that this difference is explained by the book. Having read all the discussion, however, I’m still not clear on these two points. In this sense, I feel that the reactions to the book might be more interesting than the book itself – at least at the broad level of making some kind of argument about High Theory. It does seem that there are individual contributions that have particular quibbles with various aspects of postmodern and postcolonial theory that might be interesting to read for more narrow arguments.

So, to what extent is High Theory different? In one sense it is, because it was a theory that emphasized the importance of style. In criticizing, for instance, scientific style as a hegemonic discourse, it fell into the trap of assuming that writing in a particular postcolonial literary style was somehow counterhegemonic, when in fact it was simply a new form of legitimation.

In terms of explaing the emergence of High Theory, one of my favorite essays about the postmodern moment in academia has always been:

Mascia-Lees, Francis E, Patricia Sharpe, and Colleen Ballerino Cohen. “The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions From an Feminist Perspective.” Signs 15, no. 1 (1989): 7-33.

Which points out that postmodernism became all the rage just as women and minorities were beginning to enter the academy in large numbers and master the discourses of modernsim…

The anthology we’re discussing, I think, is contending with what John Holbo calls Theory, with a capital-T: the entire institutional, professional edifice of High Theory that flourished in the 1980s and early 1990s, which at its high-water mark combined both critical theory (particularly postmodern, poststructuralist and postcolonial theory in various permutations and combinations) and identity politics/historicism/race-class-gender interests.

Theory in this sense is not theory–to criticize the elaborate confection of Theory doesn’t do anything to a term like hegemony, except perhaps to caution that if we use hegemony, we ought to be able to talk in relatively unadorned ways about what that concept is, and in relatively lucid ways about why we want to use it. One oi the smart things that Bauerlein and a lot of other authors in the anthology note is that when we write about an idea like “hegemony” from the outset as if everyone reading not only understands the concept but takes it as axiomatic, undebatable, but then also never really apply the concept in any kind of argued, evidentiarily rigorous way, that there’s both a kind of smugness and a kind of laziness that rides in behind that.

At a more general level, though, I tend to think that the difference in the reception of “theory” between the U.S. and say France is the different role public intellectuals play in the two countries.

Related to this issue might be the popular perception of education in the two countries. U.S.’s anti-intellectualism makes it difficult to take “theory” seriously.

I think the legacy of May 68 on “theory” makes sense once we reaize the powerful presence of public intellectuals in French society. There is indeed much less specialization than say in the U.S., which shortens the distance between “theory” and practice (whether in the policy room or on the streets).

So do blogs help transform ivory-tower scholars into public intellectuals?

This relates to why the reception of theory in the U.S. was different than in France. Here, an interest in theory and in “identity politics” often went hand-in-hand, to the joy of some and the rage of many, not all of whom were on the right.