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    Review of:
    Colin Davis, After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory. New York: Routledge, 2004.

  1. After reading the title of Colin Davis's After Poststructuralism, my initial reaction is to ask whether the shark hasn't been jumped once too often on a book written in the "post-theory" genre. Since at least the early 1990s, critical theorists have referred to the death of Theory, which seems invariably to prompt further theoretical reflection on what methodological norms in reading literature academically might come next. (The hackneyed idea that cultural studies eclipsed deconstruction as the predominant theoretical method comes to mind.) But the freshness of perspective Davis gives the subject recommends the book.

  2. To begin with, the first two chapters helpfully detail three academic controversies surrounding French theory--the ways its enemies have gone "after" it, so to speak, and taken it to task. Davis helps the inexperienced reader, or even a reader who just needs a short refresher course, by situating the topic in a polemical fashion. We instantly know what is at stake--namely, whether poststructuralism offers a legitimate methodology of reading, or whether as its attackers claim it is fashionable but ultimately fraudulent academic discourse. Of these three controversies, the 1965 dispute between Raymond Picard and Roland Barthes over how to read Racine is the most interesting because of its relative unfamiliarity. Most readers interested in theory are probably more familiar with the Alan Sokal affair of 1996 and with Jürgen Habermas's The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987), Davis's other two examples. What I find particularly fascinating about the Picard-Barthes conflict is the way in which Picard's indictment of Barthes and of, generally, what he called la nouvelle critique so eerily foreshadows the same complaints made by more recent critics of theory: its jargon is mere obfuscation, its interpretations are unverifiable, and it uses examples out of context (16-18). What is interesting is the date of this attack, coming as it does even before poststructuralism proper really got going. So from its very inception, these charges have dogged it. It's like the experience of a young person today reading a Flannery O'Connor story written in the 1950s and coming to the realization that perhaps the "good old days" never really were.

  3. The Picard-Barthes controversy sets up a pattern of fierce traditionalist opposition to Theory that finds a recent echo in the Sokal affair. But if Picard spoke with the authority of a scholarly point of view, Sokal, as a physicist, attacks from the outside. Davis treats the Sokal affair with a humorous touch. It turns out that Sokal's attempt to play gotcha with postmodernism by planting a "fake" academic article in the journal Social Text imbricates him all the deeper in the very social phenomenon he rails against.

    One sign of this postmodernism is the burgeoning controversy around Sokal's original Social Text article and the later Impostures intellectuelles. Rather than putting an end to the babble of "fashionable nonsense," Sokal and Bricmont found themselves increasingly engulfed in a media Babel, as the meaning and significance of their work were wrested from them . . . .But each new act of containment produces new misunderstandings and a renewed need to assert the meaning of the inaugural event in the controversy. The text cannot be trusted to speak for itself, it requires supplements and commentaries which fragment it at the very moment they endeavor to shore up its unity. (28-29)

    For Davis, the Sokal affair becomes the postmodern controversy par excellence: the more Sokal struggles to assert the real meaning of events, the deeper he is pulled into a moral quicksand.

  4. The meat of the book is four chapters that take an in-depth look at four French theorists: Jean-François Lyotard, Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, and Julia Kristeva. One of the unexpected qualities of the book is that it doesn't focus directly on what are arguably the big names of poststructuralism: Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze. (Davis does bring in a discussion of Foucault and Derrida in one of his framing chapters on Habermas, and the conclusion's meditation on the spectrality of theory seems largely informed by Derrida.) On the one hand, this choice offers a novel perspective on the subject, but on the other, Davis's quirky decisions make his discussion unrepresentative of poststructuralism as a whole. Based on the book's title, a reader may be expecting to come to some better understanding of "poststructuralism," but, with the exception of Kristeva, these are not theorists one would put equally and unproblematically under this category. If one were looking for a basic introduction to poststructuralism, one would be better advised to consult a book such as Catherine Belsey's Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. Given the focus on the Sokal affair and on Lyotard, Davis risks conflating poststructuralism with postmodernism. Also, if one is truly interested in what comes after poststructuralism, why look back at Levinas and Althusser? Yes, these thinkers are indispensable to a better understanding of later writers--especially Derrida. (Davis notes the connection between Althusser's notion of a "symptomatic" reading and Derrida's "double science" of reading.) But if the book never follows through on a thorough engagement with Derrida, why focus on precursors?

  5. In looking at the before of poststructuralism as well as its after Davis focuses on the complex issue of legacy. This is one of the book's major strengths. In the book's introduction and in the chapter on Habermas, Davis points to Derrida's discussion of "the constitutive ambiguity of legacies" (7) in Du droit à la philosophie. Unlike Habermas, for whom the concept of the unfinished project of the Enlightenment appears black and white--either you're with Habermas's efforts to complete the early Hegel's abandoned project of communicative reason or you're against the Enlightenment and all the fruits of modernity--Foucault, Derrida, and even Habermas's own Frankfurt School progenitors Horkheimer and Adorno maintain a more complicated relationship with the philosophical past. For Derrida, in particular, "it is the nature of the legacy to be in dispute; and this is as true of Kant's legacy as it is of the legacy of poststructuralism, which we have still not settled" (7). So in looking forward, we also need to look back, but perhaps look back "otherwise." We can no more be "after" poststructuralism than poststructuralist philosophers can be "after" Kant, in the sense of being over Kant. Davis notes: "Like Foucault, Derrida does not endorse the prospect of any abrupt liberation from Kant; rather, he proposes to question the claims of philosophy by staying in touch with the great texts of the past and finding within them the moments of excess which make it possible to envisage a transformation of the intellectual programme" (54). The goal of Davis's book is to access the contributions of these thinkers in helping to better understand "the grand philosophical problems of knowledge, meaning, ethics, and identity" (6).

  6. The book's central treatment of Lyotard, Levinas, Althusser, and Kristeva is organized around four questions Kant considered to be of fundamental importance for philosophy to grapple with: What can I know; What ought I to do; What may I hope; What is the human being? On the face of it, the linkages between Lyotard and epistemology, Levinas and ethics, and Kristeva and identity make sense. But what of the link between Althusser and hope?

    If history is a process without a subject [as it is in Althusser's structuralist Marxism], it is also a process without aim or end; the historical dialectic is always overdetermined, the superstructure interferes with the infrastructure rather than being obligingly transformed by it, there is always too much going on and too many factors to be accounted for to ensure a smooth continuation of the process of the past and present into a foreseeable future. (104)

    If history is an aimless process, then how can one come to have hope in any kind of better future? To answer this question, Davis does to Althusser what Althusser had earlier done to Marx and the entire Marxist tradition: reads the text against the grain.

  7. Davis accomplishes this by focusing primarily on Althusser's autobiography L'Avenir dure longtemps, rather than on For Marx, Reading Capital, or "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." What Davis digs up between the lines of the book is Althusser's search for a "materialism of the encounter" in which "meaning is made through the contingency of the encounter rather than given in advance and pre-inscribed in history" (127). This contingency holds the door open for a kind of hope. This is an odd kind of hope because it only arrives through contingency, hence entirely unlooked for. To answer Kant's question "What may I hope?" in a poststructuralist problematic, then, is to allow for an unhoped for hope. This kind of hope doesn't fall into a conventionally imagined narrative pattern. How can one narrate the contingent?

  8. Hence, besides Kant's questions, a unifying thread of the book is the analysis of the reactions of the respective thinkers to the concept of "story." In La Condition postmoderne, we may remember, Lyotard argues that when access to information proliferates at an exponential rate, grand, legitimizing meta-narratives collapse into a ragtag set of incompatible language games--displaying a seeming questioning of story. But Davis surveys a wider spectrum of attitudes toward the notion of story in French theory running from Kristeva's enthusiastic embrace of the apparently pre-given urge of people to tell stories to Levinas's ascetic desire to do without examples altogether in Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence. Kristeva's taste for and Levinas's dislike of story hinges on the same issue. For Levinas,

    The story is a site of disruption or resistance through which the text is fractured, brought up against its own otherness to itself. Through the example, the Other slips into the discourse of the same and insinuates a breach within it. The smooth surface of the text is broken, disclosing a moment of indecision, suggesting that the argument is not yet closed, that further revisions to the theory are still possible or necessary, that the Other's voice may still be heard. (89)

    Kristeva's interest in stories makes Levinas uncomfortable to the point of disavowal. "The story deforms what gives it form; in other words its form is uneasy, precarious, and at best provisional, it never entirely accommodates the material which it nevertheless makes intelligible" (146). This provisionality, like that of the dynamics of transference in psychoanalysis, allows it to elude the totalitarian attempt to control meaning.

  9. Davis concludes the book with a thoughtful meditation on the ghostly living on and spectral afterlife of theory after its apparent demise in the 1980s. This chapter reminds me of another book in the "post-theory" genre: Herman Rapaport's The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse. While Rapaport's book--a really thorough consideration of the vicissitudes of the "life" of deconstruction--is good, Rapaport is more Derrida-centric. Davis's approach is good because it opens onto others' views in a more inclusive way. Both Davis and Rapaport fight a rearguard defense of theory, but Davis's wider focus allows for more avenues of thought. Davis's use of the four Kantian questions and his continuing attention to the role of story help keep the book together, as does his approval of the fact that theorists such as Barthes (21) and Lyotard (72-73) aren't afraid to admit their own complicity in the issues they thematize. Those that try to criticize theory as "Theory" with a capital "t" create a strawman argument, in that poststructuralist philosophy has never been about creating the ultimate frame of reference, but wanted to open up philopsophy to other questions. It's the opponents of theory--to varying degrees Picard, Sokal, and Habermas--who end up trying to create a definitive "scientific" platform from which to prosecute theory for foreclosing the Enlightenment project of modernity. Davis reminds us that poststructuralism doesn't spell the death of philosophy or of Western civilization; rather, poststructuralism holds the door open to allow new questions to enter the unfinished project of modernity.

    10. English Department
    Linn-Benton Community College
    bockoven@efn.org

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