Does anyone "do" theory anymore?

Depends on what you mean by "do," I think--with a wink to my favorite ex-president--and also on what you mean by "theory." But the answer is more or less, "no," no one does theory, if by "theory" you will allow me to mean something a little bit different than it usually does (and the same for "does," I guess). I'm also not sure--even though I love theory and lots of the people who did it--that this is such a terrible thing.

Let's call "theory," in the academic humanities at least, the thing that all of a sudden beginning in the late 1960s in France and in the early 1980s in the United States and the UK opened up an enormous network of possibility within literary-philosophical thought. The experience of theory had to do with the rapid enlargement of the field of intellectual play, bringing into the discipline(s) a number of new objects of study and new methodologies for studying them. Theorists, at least under this definition, were largely those who opened those fields of possibility up, and they were abetted by a number of translators, both literal and figurative, who were able to teach others how to read and think through--through not in the sense of through and beyond, but in the sense of a modality--this new material called theory.

Once the fields opened up, of course, then you could spend lots of time--and people did--going backwards to theory's sources, from Derrida, say, not only to the Greeks (who everyone knew about anyway) but to Saussure or Levi-Strauss or Heidegger or Nietzsche or Husserl, and so on. "Theory" thus expanded significantly to include a number of thinkers and writers who had no idea they were part of (or were going to be part of) "theory" when it came to be called theory. Many graduate and undergraduate theory surveys begin with Russian Formalism, but when Russian formalists were doing what they did, they weren't really doing theory, at least not self-consciously--it's only within the frame of theory that they came to be seen as the first step in a larger story. (Some courses on literary theory begin with Aristotle, and this is another, longer story in which earlier texts that don't seem to belong to "theory" proper are put back into a theory-based framework as a gesture against the fetishization of the new--but I would argue that in those courses "theory" actually doesn't mean what I mean by "theory" here).

What this means is that very few people ever actually "did" theory, in the sense that they created the opening through which others could move into new worlds of thought. Much of the work of "doing" theory after the initial creative stroke of possibility (not insight, I think) was either to spend time translating or explaining (here think of Eagleton or Culler or any of the many many introducers), or in exploring some new part of the new space carved out by theory (so that you get a feminism inflected by theory, a Marxism inflected by theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and so on). Many of these explorations effectively allowed people to approach doing something like what I mean by "doing" "theory"--the work of Judith Butler, or Gayatri Spivak, can be said to be so creative as to shape large new spaces within theory, or even to push the boundaries of the new theory-space into new realms. At the limit, then, between "inventing" something new and "applying" something old to something new you find people who come so close to doing theory that they might as well be doing theory.

In the sense in which I'm talking about theory, then, very few people ever "did" it, and most of those who did were "creators of a discourse," the category Foucault uses in "What is an author?" to describe people like Freud or Marx who opened up new modes of thinking. They have now been folded into theory (any theory survey will include them and probably Nietzsche), but this actually subsumes them under a category to which I don't think they properly belong in any historical sense.

After the first doers of theory (who are "first" only in the sense that they make something visible first, but whose visibility can then often be traced back past them into earlier centuries--think of the ways in which Chaucer can be made, after theory, to produce all the insights of theory avant la lettre, as it were, or in the case of Derrida, the way Laozi can be made to do the same thing)--after the first doers of theory, then, you might think of a second class of people who are doers of theory, prime, in the sense that they take the insights of the first group and push them into areas that the first group has not yet thought of or imagined. Probably there's a continuum all the way down from there, ending with some graduate student in the early 1990s writing a paper that "deconstructs Henry James," or "does a Marxist reading of Shakespeare," or whatever (this was me, so please don't think I'm making fun of anyone).

Is anyone still doing theory, then?

There continues to be a clear interest in having more people do theory, and especially of having another French person come and give us something new to think about. I take the fashionable rise and fall of certain French figures--Levinas, Bourdieu, Badiou (still rising), Auge (rising?)--as the mark of a theory-hunger around the academy. Sometimes this theory-hunger is easy to make fun of, since it really seems to believe that theory has to come from France...

Obviously, people like Butler and Spivak are still doing theory, though I would argue that neither of them is doing theory as much as they were earlier in their careers, when their insights were devastatingly able to generate entire "discourses," so that it would make sense to say you were doing a "Butlerian" reading of something. Spivak is a tricky case because I think her writing has yet to be fully grasped in all its complex greatness, but you get the idea.

There are academic superstars, though only a few, who seem to be doing theory. Zizek is a good example here, but Zizek isn't giving anyone a program, and "theory," at least as I'm using it here, is distinguished from great intellectual work primarily through its ability to generate a program. About the only two people I can think of even attempting to generate a program these days are Franco Moretti, who has done so in a series of articles published in the New Left Review, and Bill Brown, whose opening essay to the Things special issue of Critical Inquiry (now published as a book) approaches the programmatic. The interesting thing about Brown's own work, for instance in A Sense of Things, however, is how astonishingly modest and subtle it is. Its readings, unlike its introduction, do not betray programmatic ambitions, and this strikes me as very admirable. After that... lots of people are applying new general paradigms (cosmopolitanism, globalization, transnationalism, to give three names for a mode that seems increasingly valuable and necessary) but none of those paradigms is associated with a name, nor is any of them more than the forced intersection (call it interdisciplinarity, if that helps) of previously insulated realms inside theory in order to produce complexity, the necessary third stage (after ground-clearing, and self-critique) in any theoretical moment.

(later edit: I forgot Agamben, whose work feels very theory-like, though it seems to have trouble generating much traction, except around the human-animal nexus, which is one of the places where a lot of interesting work is happening.)

The strange corollary to all this is that, since theory allowed people to become famous across fields and disciplines, now that almost no one is doing theory anymore, almost no one is more famous than they were 10 years ago (even Butler and Spivak are less famous than they were 10 years ago). Brown and Moretti and perhaps Zizek the exceptions, but beyond them, there are a bunch of people who are well-known in their fields (the best people in the 18th century, etc.) but who have no broad reputation outside of them. This wreaks havoc on anyone trying to organize an interdisciplinary speaker series, by the way, since it's very hard to find speakers who will attract broad audiences unless they do theory, and the well is running dry. Other than that, it's not terrible, of course, just the way things are.

Beyond all those people, of course, are still plenty of people for whom theory was and remains important, who continue to "do" theory but only in the minor sense that their work is unthinkable without theory, and that they in using theory continue both to produce theory-use as a methodological model, and to occasionally unearth small corner of the space opened up in the initial theory-moment (oh, ok, I'll say it: they invaginate new spaces). And then of course there are the people who are glad it's all over, for various reasons, some good and some venal.

If you think about theory this way, New Historicism, as the last recognizable movment in theory, is actually also the end of theory as such--Minerva's owl, as theory liked to say. The need to generate a programmatic statement, even reluctantly (as Greenblatt did), is very much a theory-need, and the desire to produce a journal that would articulate that program is also, it seems to me, only possible in a world driven by programmatic thinking (that is, the world of theory). New Historicism's victory over theory--that is, the degree to which historical work has become so completely fashionable as to be nearly invisible, and the number of people for and places in which history is always the final answer to an interpretive question--is thus a victory that emerges from inside the cultural language of theory, but which in establishing itself also managed to destroy the possibility that it could be responded to in the mode of theory... it did this by frequently proclaiming that it was not, in fact, a theory, but rather a set of linked questions, which of course it was. In my deconstructive reading of New Historicism, then, it's the apotheosis of theory precisely because it leads to theory's "death."

Lately I have been running into people who feel depressed by the current state of affairs.

They feel that the theory revolution for which they fought so hard in the 1980s--and which they felt like they had more or less won--has been relegated to the ash-heaps of history. Yesterday at a party someone I like and admire, upon hearing me say that I sometimes consciously mimic Jameson's prose style, responded, with genuine horror, "surely you don't do that today?!" Well, sadly for both of us, I had been talking about the writing I'd done Friday. I'm of course happy to do what I do, but the ash-heap feeling hit me pretty hard at the time.

But is there really anything to be depressed about? In the end, not really, at least not in the long run. Theory was good, but of course it couldn't last--however infinite its promises may have seemed, what remains once the excitement dies down and the territory is more or less mapped is the hard work of continuing to work without the big project to guide you. But someday in the future there will be a new "theory," though it will not be the same as our theory; at some point some new insight or set of insights will inaugurate a new, exciting era in which everything we've known seems wrong, and all kinds of work becomes not only possible to do but impossible to live without.

Those who are caught in that initial moment will feel like their world has been turned upside down; they will prosletyze, they will translate, they will shine this new theory's light into the dark corners of the space it discovers and/or invents. From this future vantage point the triumphs of our theory will seem, surely, limited and provincial; some generous souls will presumably recognize in the advent of their new theory the loss of the perspective made possible by ours.

And some of those folks will go back and read the people the theorists of their day were reading, and will trace the history of their theory backwards to a set of writers whose connection to this new "theory" was invisible to them at the time; the role of these writers will be to have been precursors for something they couldn't recognize or imagine, but which nonetheless thanks to the insight of the next creator(s) of discourses will become recognizable and imaginable through them. Those old writers will turn out, belatedly, to matter more than they know, to have written the thing that made it possible to write the thing that made it possible to see.

And perhaps many such texts are written, not just one or two of them, but fail, for the lack of the right reader, to become one origin of an origin for a new theory. Perhaps their authors will not even recognize that which, in their own books, might come in another era to be readable as the opening to a new universe of thought, this future as invisible to them as it will be visible in the future. Perhaps, but perhaps not--and how will you ever know?--you're writing one of those books right now. The obligations would be startling.