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The theme "What's Left of Theory?" triggers a number of responses. "Everything else, for what could be more conservative." "Not much, fortunately," or perhaps "just enough for Cultural Studies to become an incisive and not just a popular discipline." I take it my audience consists of members of "intellectual occupations" (teachers, researchers, artists) (Bourdieu 420) and confess that my "enunciative interest" (Frow 15) in offering this paper is informed by my dedication to theorizing both in English literature and philosophy since the 1960s and more recently also in cinema studies.
"What's Left of Theory?" suggests a peculiarly Anglo-American problematic. We would hardly expect a Polish, French, Italian, Japanese, or Chinese scholar to conceive of their fields of enquiry outside some sort of theoretical practice. On the other hand, there has been published over the last decade or so a stream of books and articles in English in the "Against Theory" mode. Why is this so and what or who is responsible?
When W J T Mitchell edited the volume Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism in 1985 in response to a paper by Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, he collected views that had been aired since the beginning of the eighties. Underlying their paper (Critical Inquiry, Summer 1982) is that theory in a "nontrivial sense always consists of an attempt to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without" (Mitchell 139). This separation of theory and practice looks strangely familiar to those who recall the exchange between F R Leavis and Rene Wellek. Paradoxically, in this very exchange Leavis was drawn to make statements which made it quite clear that his own practice entailed a well controlled theoretical apparatus, with the exception that he preferred not to draw anyone's attention to it. Not even a personal literary critical morality escapes theoretical framing once it is generalized into a discipline. Nor was his insistence on intrinsic conceptualization able to hold sway for very long. On the other hand, the Knapp and Michaels "Against Theory" view stands in the sharpest of contrasts to the position exemplified by Deleuze, for whom theory is no more or less than "a practice with concepts" and one from which we cannot escape, if we try, all...