Not long ago and in certain small circles of academic life, the word “theory” conveyed a special magic. It signified both sophistication and freedom, elevating its devotees into a rarefied world of European ideas that would bestow the gift of insight into the hidden truth of language, or culture, or history.
Two meanings were intertwined even if they often ran at cross purposes. On the one hand, “theory” carried a hint of privilege, the cultivation of exquisite skills in reading and interpretation that were accessible only to an elite. On the other hand, it implied the hopeful idea of an emancipatory practice, since presumably anyone who wished to “do theory” did so because it promised, someday and somehow, to link up with the moral and political business of transforming the world. If theory was the question, practice was the answer. But even in the years of high enthusiasm for theory, the answer seemed forever deferred for another day.
“Theory” once conveyed a special magic, signifying both sophistication and freedom.
Today, now that the passion for theory has been largely spent, it can be hard to explain why it was once felt to be so fascinating. Surely its exotic pedigree played a role. Theory, after all, was not the name for a specific doctrine; it was a serviceable if somewhat baggy term for various ideas and intellectual movements that arrived as imports from the European Continent. The high avatars of theory—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser—were mostly French, and they had received a rigorous training in the European philosophical canon.
But when their work was translated into English, it seldom received a warm welcome among members of the Anglophone philosophical profession, who tended to see it as an interloper, an unruly child who had scant respect for the established standards of clarity or rational argument. It found a far more hospitable welcome in departments of literature, where it metamorphosed into “French theory,” a rich brew of ideas that left many graduate students intoxicated if often bewildered, though it was best to keep one’s confusion to oneself. In the 1970s and ’80s theory swept through the humanities like a new gospel. Many were converted, some resisted, but few could doubt that they were living through a time of intellectual revolution. Like many revolutions, however, what began in hope eventually petrified into dogma. “Theory” became a fashion, and then lost its shine.
The Summer of Theory is almost the title of both a film and a book (in the film, the summer becomes “long”). They address a story that is far less familiar to Anglophone readers: how theory came to Germany, where it ignited passionate debate among intellectuals and artists and inspired new ways of thinking about literature and society. Both the film and the book are ingeniously crafted, and they are such a delight to watch or to read that they awaken summertime joy even as they speak to weighty themes.
