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November 8, 2008
The reception of "French Theory" in Australia and the United States happened around the beginning of the 1980s, when the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Derrida were being put to work on campuses and in some alternative communities, often as the theoretical foundation for a new type of politics.
According to Ethan Kleinberg's review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews François Cusset in French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, concentrates on exploring how the reception of French Theory in fields such as Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, Post-colonial Studies, and literary criticism in general.
According to Cusset, it was in these "niche markets" of academic culture that the "most sophisticated tools of textual analysis and the new university came to be applied to subjects as wide ranging as gangsta rap, "Harlequin" romance readers, Star Trek fans, and even the supposed 'philosophical' subtext of the Seinfeld series." Here, the counter-cultural inflection bestowed upon French Theory made it appear the appropriate tool for criticism of popular culture and allowed for the work of some of the most abstruse thinkers to seem like an appropriate tool for almost any text. On Cusset's reading, despite the attraction to the critical dimensions of post-structuralist philosophy, especially for critically examining sites of knowledge, the American academics that applied this thought in teaching and research actually remained within the American utilitarian tradition.
Cusset articulates the ways that strategies of encapsulation created an "uprooting and reassembling" that allowed the American proponents of French Theory to legitimate or authorize their work by recourse to quotations while at the same time altering that work to fit their own (practical) intellectual or political agenda. This rhizomatic proliferation of French Theory soon led to the sort of mutations that ultimately made the American variant unrecognizable in France.
So whilst while in France Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and company remained a disparate group of thinkers, in America they were all incorporated under the "brand name" French Theory and applied in accordance with market forces. In other words, French Theory did not exist in France and its popularity in America was the result of a new market that desired its product.
Kleinberg says that this argument requires that one accept Bill Reading's argument in The University in Ruins (1997) that liberal arts education -- and the university in general -- has undergone a profound change in its mission and identity as it has been transformed from a site designed to foster a unified national culture into a corporate-style service industry selling a vacuous and indefinable notion of "excellence."
Kleinberg says that:
Using Reading, Cusset asserts that the shift to university-as-service-industry led to a need for increased specialization to provide specific sites of interests that would attract the student/customer and that the brand French Theory came to serve this purpose. For Cusset, this reveals both the popularity and most troubling aspects of French Theory in America where a subject like Madonna becomes the object of "serious" academic discourse, employing French Theory to do so, for the utilitarian purpose of attracting students/customers to the major or selling books.
What is missing from Cusset's account is a sustained engagement with the ways that American theorists such as Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and others actually appropriated, incorporated and applied the theories of these French intellectuals in their work. There is little or no discussion of the role of historians or philosophers in this reception (the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, for instance, is entirely absent) and there is virtually no textual analysis. Even the chapter on "Academic Stars" (Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Stanley Fish, Edward Said, Richard Rorty, and Frederic Jameson) spends no more than five pages on any one thinker.
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