Abstract

We are grateful to Stanley Fish for demonstrating what “Against Theory” had merely assumed, that the only kind of theory worth attacking is the kind which claims to be more than just another form of practice. Some readers have thought that our arguments were directed against all general reflection about literature or criticism. Others have thought that we were resisting the encroachment on literary study of themes derived from politics, or psychoanalysis, or philosophy. These are plausible misreading of our intention, since the term “theory” is indeed sometimes applied to any critical argument marked by historical or aesthetic generalization or by the reading of literature in terms of themes derived from other disciplines. But, as Fish shows, neither empirical generality nor thematic novelty is enough to make an argument theoretical in more than a trivial sense, that is, in a sense that marks it as importantly different in kind from other critical arguments. Theory in a nontrivial sense always consists in the attempt “to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without,” and this strong kind of theory is the kind whose coherence we deny . It is also the kind of theory engaged in by the vast majority of those who consider themselves theorists—including many who might prefer to think of themselves as practicing theory in some weaker sense.At the conclusion of “Philosophy without Principles,” Richard Rorty appears to join those who think we are attacking theory in its weaker senses as well as in the strong sense just described. He suggests that eliminating the writing and teaching of theory would deprive literary scholars of “an opportunity to discuss philosophy books—as well as novels, poems, critical essays, and so forth—with literature students” . If this were the only issue between Rorty’s version of pragmatism and ours, our disagreement would come to an immediate end, since nothing could be further from the aims of “Against Theory” than rendering a judgment about what books should be discussed in literary classrooms. But our disagreement runs deeper than debates about the curriculum. It involves, first, a fundamental disagreement about language and, second, an equally fundamental disagreement about the nature and consequences of pragmatism. Steven Knapp is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley; his book Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge is forthcoming. Walter Benn Michaels, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is working on the relation between literary and economic forms of representation in nineteenth-century America. A previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” appeared in the Winter 1980 issue. The authors’ joint contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Against Theory,” and “A Reply to Our Critics,” appeared respectively in the Summer 1982 and June 1983 issues