"Theory Wars" never really ended in the '90s (roots of Woke's "nonsense", BS jargon)

[C C]

https://themillions.com/2020/10/whos-afr...heory.html

EXCERPT: In a pique of indignation, the editors of the journal Philosophy and Literature ran a “Bad Writing Contest” from 1995 to 1998 to highlight jargony excess among the professoriate. Inaugurated during the seventh inning of the Theory Wars, Philosophy and Literature placed themselves firmly amongst the classicists, despairing at the influence of various critical “isms.” For the final year that the contest ran, the “winner” was Judith Butler, ... author of the classic work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. [...] the “Bad Writing Contest” successfully made Butler the target of sarcastic opprobrium, with editorial pages using the incident as another volley against “fashionable nonsense” (as Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont called it) supposedly reigning ascendant from Berkeley to Cambridge.

The Theory Wars, that is the administrative argument over which various strains of 20th-century continental European thought should play in the research and teaching of the humanities, has never exactly gone away, even while departments shutter and university work is farmed out to poorly-paid contingent faculty. Today you’re just as likely to see aspersions on the use of critical theory appear in fevered, paranoid Internet threads warning about “Cultural Marxism” as you are on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, even while at many schools literature requirements are being cut, so as to make the whole debate feel more like a Civil War reenactment than the Battle of Gettysburg. In another sense, however, and Butler’s partisans seem to have very much won the argument from the ‘80s and ‘90s—as sociologically inflected Theory-terms from “intersectionality” to “privilege” have migrated from Diacritics to Twitter (though often as critical malapropism)—ensuring that this war of attrition isn’t headed to armistice anytime soon. 

So, what exactly is “Theory?” For scientists, a “theory” is a model based on empirical observation that is used to make predictions about natural phenomenon; for the lay-person a “theory” is a type of educated guess or hypothesis. For practitioners of “critical theory,” the phrase means something a bit different. A critical theorist engages with interpretation, engaging with culture (from epic poems to comic books) to explain how their social context allows or precludes certain readings, beyond whatever aesthetic affinity the individual may feel. Journalist Stuart Jeffries explains the history (or “genealogy,” as they might say) of one strain of critical theory in his excellent Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, describing how a century ago an influential group of German Marxist social scientists, including Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, developed a trenchant vocabulary for “what they called the culture industry,” so as to explore “a new relationship between culture and politics.” At the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, a new critical apparatus was developed for the dizzying complexity of industrial capitalism, and so words like “reify” and “commodity fetish” (as well as that old Hegelian chestnut “dialectical”) became humanistic bywords. [rest of excerpt in spoiler]

Most of the original members of the Frankfurt School were old fashioned gentlemen [...] Several decades later ... Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, would apply critical theory to popular culture. These largely working-class theorists ... would use a similar vocabulary as that developed by the Frankfurt School, but they’d extend the focus of their studies into considerations of comics and punk music, slasher movies and paperback novels, while also bringing issues of race and gender to bear in their writings.

In rejecting the elitism of their predecessors, the Birmingham School democratized critical theory  [...] What these scholars shared with Frankfurt, alongside a largely Marxian sensibility, was a sense that “culture was an important category because it helps us to recognize that one life-practice (like reading) cannot be torn out of a large network constituted by many other life-practices—working, sexual orientation, [or] family life,” as elucidated by Simon During in his introduction to The Cultural Studies Reader...

[...] A third strain influenced “Theory” as it developed in American universities towards the end of the 20th century, and it’s probably the one most stereotypically associated with pretension and obfuscation. From a different set of intellectual sources, French post-structural and deconstructionist thought developed in the ‘60s and ‘70s at roughly the same time as the Birmingham School. Sometimes broadly categorized as “postmodernist” thinkers, French theory included writers of varying hermeticism like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault ... Francois Cusset provides a helpful primer in French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, the best single volume introduction on the subject. He writes that these “Ten or twelve more or less contemporaneous writers” ... with their focus the “critique of ‘critique’ itself, since all of them interrogate in their own way” the very idea of tradition. ... For traditionalists the Frankfurt School’s Marxism (arguably never all that Marxist) was bad enough; with French theory there was a strong suspicion of at best relativism, at worst outright nihilism.

Theory has an influence simultaneously more and less enduring than is sometimes assumed. Its critics in the ‘80s and ‘90s warned that it signaled the dissolution of the Western canon, yet I can assure you from experience that undergraduates never stopped reading Shakespeare [...] But ... its influence has been wide and unexpected, for as colleges pivot towards a business-centered STEM curriculum, the old fights about critical theory have simply migrated online. Much of the criticism against theory in the first iteration of this dispute was about what such thinkers supposedly said ... but maybe even more vociferous were the claims about how they were saying things. The indictment about theory then becomes not just an issue of metaphysics, but one of style. It’s the claim that nobody can argue with a critical theorist because the writing itself is so impenetrable, opaque, and confusing. It’s the argument that if theory reads like anything, that it reads like bullshit... (MORE)