We'll Always Have Paris

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French theory is dead. Long may it live.

IT'S A BITTERSWEET TIME for those of us who, once upon a time, fell in love with "theory." Theory -- that's the brusque American shorthand term for the work of a group of mostly French philosophers and cultural critics, from Michel Foucault to Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida to Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray to Jean Baudrillard. Beginning in the late 1960s, their ideas about the nature of language, the truth claims of philosophy, the ways power is exerted in society, the nature of gender and sexuality, and many more issues swarmed across the Atlantic to conquer the humanities departments in American universities.

Now theory's reign is coming to an end. As Mark Greif points out in an article in The American Prospect (Aug. 2004), humanities scholars have been watching the decline for several years. Whether it's mainly a generational shift as boomer-era theory-heads age, or is tied to the rise of conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the fact is that theory's influence has faded. To me, the question of why seems less important than assessing theory's mixed legacy -- what it has given us, and what it has kept us from doing.

The French invasion transformed how many American intellectuals looked at nearly everything, mostly by making everything more complex. Theory gave us an altered image of the "human being." We were not the captains of our souls, but in many ways were the product of everything said and written over the centuries about entities like "the female," "the American," "the black," and "the human being" itself.

The pioneers of theory were nearly all men and women of the left, but they were in revolt against both the doctrinaire Stalinism of the midcentury French Communist Party and what they saw as the simplistic moralism of the era's "engaged" leftist writers and thinkers. They wanted richer models of how we're formed by cultural and social forces -- yet they also wanted to continue the great leftist project of liberating the people. The idea that liberation might grow out of radical complexity was their keynote: Their enemies were the large, coercive "master ideas" of the left as well as the right. The way forward was by showing that these ideas were actually jerry-built facades covering a teeming world of difference and potential freedom.

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