There are actually some good points, I think, against the critical theory/ post-modernist/ social justice....insert lots of other ideological lenses here.....paradigms. I made an interesting discovery. I've been associating opposition to these ways of thinking with Christianity. There's a long-standing, ongoing dispute between Christianity and post-modernism, etc. But then I discovered that some of the people who are most strongly and directly critiquing critical theory are also critical of theism and talk about how it makes no sense to believe in God.
So, they lose me on that. The Christian critique of critical theory loses me as a thinker and the humanist critique of critital theory loses me as a Christian. But anyway, neither of those are the main point. The main point is that I like critical theory and am fascinated by it.
A lot of what I'm calling the humanist critique comes from inside academia itself. Harold Bloom spoke of 'the school of resentment'. In 1996, Alan Sokal, a physicist, published a paper in a cultural studies journal which was purportedly about the application of post modern theory to physics. Then, after the paper was reviewed, accepted and published, he announced that it was a hoax to expose the shortcomings of post modern theory, because it was basically a bunch of nonsense that nevertheless conformed to their expectations about what constitutes scholarship. A similar thing was done more recently (in the last couple of years) by Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose. They wrote a whole series of papers that effectively used the discourse of critical theory to make arguments that were seriously flawed but were reviewed and published anyway - and some praised as ground-breaking - because they represented acceptable ideology. They, and others, call the dominant movement in academia at the moment, 'grievance studies'.
These examples remind me of the Ern Malley affair which happened in Australia in 1943. Conservative writers, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, wanted to mock modernist poetry and show how vacuous and lacking in real literary value it was, so they wrote 16 poems in one day, imitating the style of modernist poetry, and submitted them to a modernist literary journal, claiming that they were the work of Ern Malley, who didn't actually exist. The literary journal devoted a whole issue to Ern Malley and hailed him as a genius. So, it was pretty embarrassing for Max Harris, the editor of Angry Penguins - the literary journal in which the poems had appeared - when it was revealed that the poems were a hoax. The hoax affected the reputation of modernism in Australia and undermined, not just modernist poetry and poets, but also novelists - for example, Patrick White - and artists who painted in an abstract, modernist style.
Interestingly, McAuley went on to found a periodical called Quadrant, which is still around today, and just three days ago published an article titled, 'The True Crisis of the Humanities', which brings us back to the current issue.
Personally, I have a deep appreciation for literature and history, which was only encouraged by my Arts degree. I think the criticism of the academic enterprise as it is currently conducted is a bit misplaced, although I do accept some of the points that are being made. This hatred for critical theory or literary theory is too much, and it's very negative. Aside from the quality of the argument being made, I just don't like negative arguments or books where the whole thesis is a negative statement. For example - and I want to give an example that's not related to this issue that I'm writing about - books that argue that the internet is adversely affecting our minds and lives, and the whole book is about that. I don't see the point of doing all that work of writing a book, and the main function of the book is to point out a problem - to say something is wrong.
I thought it was interesting that, in the Quadrant article, the writer singles out the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism as representative of everything anti-western culture and traditional humanities. Come on....that's going too far. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism includes representative work from a vast range of the most important scholars and thinkers going back to Aristotle and Plato.
.....I'm reading the article as I wrote this, so it's like a live commentary....
now the writer is criticising structuralism, which he says, 'reduces human beings to place-markers in an infinite system of signs'. I'm not sure what that means but it's not how I understand structuralism.
but I want to change tack and agree with the anti-theory argument in some ways, but in a way that shows why I disagree with them in other ways. I've noticed the decline in English (as in English literature) as a separate discipline. The movement is towards 'cultural studies'. A lot of universities don't have separate schools or faculties of English like they used to - they've been brought under the aegis of media studies, communication. Where English courses are offered, they often don't have any reference to actual works of literature. I've heard from students who desperately want to study literature, because that's why they chose to do English, and some semesters, there is not one course available to them that actually deals with literature. So, I see that and I don't like it. It's part of what those who are saying there is a crisis are talking about.
But - and this is just my own personal view - theory, literary theory, critical theory, whatever you want to call it, is intrinsic to the study of literature. Theory is not the enemy or the problem.
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