In an earlier RR blog, I argued that the latter part of the twentieth century will go down in literary history as the AGE OF THEORY.  The specific dates I picked I also stand behind: May 1968 to September 11, 2001.  

I pick those dates for their Hegelian resonance.  If you are unfamiliar with Hegel’s theory of history, you lack a key perspective for understanding American neo-liberal (conservative) ideology.  For decades, Hegel fell into neglect in America because he was seen as simply the intellectual forerunner of Marx and after the Red Scare of the fifties, anything smelling of Marxism was shunned in America.  The result is a generation (or more) of Americans who have no idea what it means to speak of dialectics, let alone Hegel’s application of it to decoding (what he saw as) an invisible hand operating behind history’s seemingly meaningless march through this happened and then this and then that.

Francis Fukayama changed Hegel’s reception in America with his influential book The End of History and the Last Man.  As a member of the US State Department (under Reagan and than later under Bush #1) Fukayama reintroduced Hegel to the same conservative audience that had made Ayn Rand a God.  Fakayama taught them Hegel’s conception of history: that it consists of two elements: matter and spirit, and that what mattered was the dialectical development of the spirit into its final form.  For Hegel that spirit was birthed in the French Revolution and its World Historical Figure was Napoleon (thus the end of history at the level of spirit which then lags in its implementation at the level of historical reality).  

As presented by Fukayama, Hegel appeared as an advocate for globalization, for a final stage of civilization that was simply democratic capitalism as envisioned by neo-liberals.  Here you can see Hegel’s key assertion: that history takes place at the level of ideas.  The implementation of those ideas in reality is a secondary matter.

In many respects I remain a Hegelian (though attuned to Alain Badiou's critique of Hegel as offering a "false infinity"-- but that is another subject for another blog).  So when I say 1968 initiates the age of theory, I am linking the cultural phenomenon of theory to the arresting of the “Sixties Revolution.”  The idea of the sixties remains—it hangs over us as a dream deferred, as what was thought and not implemented, not made real. 

Thus as Badiou has argued, the last epoch has been one of Restoration (in his book The Century), of a conservative counter-revolutionary backlash (pledged to prevent the implementation of the sixties ideal).  It follows then that as right wing ideology has shaped the matter of our reality, left wing radical thought has retreated into abstract thought, into theory. 

In such circumstances it also follows that the creative impulse could not operate fully in the mode of fiction, of realism, because the spirit of realism in the last age has been controlled by neo-liberalism.  Instead the spirit of the literary, of the aesthetic, operated in the mode of critique.  Critique is simply a second order operation of thought.  If you call your treatise a critique of reason, you are saying you are using reason (the first order, the foundation) to analyze itself (so becoming the second order of thought).  Given that conservative ideology controls reason (so that it became impossible to imagine a future as anything other than a pefection of what is--democratic liberalism), radical thought fell into critique, into theory.

Yet as Theory chugged away, attracting what I would say was easily the lion share of the best and the brightest, what came to fill the vacuum in traditional artistic modes and genres was a spirit that we see most nakedly in Reality TV.  In literature it is the triumph of the memoir and of confessional poetry.  It is a hunger for the real, unmediated, unmixed with neo-liberal ideology.  But what a wasteland followed.

Somehow, William Blake saw all this so long ago, even as Hegel was writing.  He railed so stridently against the loss of the imagination because he saw how it would leave us with nothing but Big Brother and Survivor.  

The question now is—has that epoch ended with the events of September 11, 2001?  I think it has.

NOTES

Although Fred Jameson was always dismissive of Fukayama in class lectures, it is interesting to contrast that attitude with Derrida’s very respectful engagement with Fukayama in Specters of Marx.  Indeed, Derrida’s critique of Fukayama probably marks the apex of his cultural influence.

 *

My editors have taken control of the manuscript of my (ahem) memoir!  They are keying in the changes.  Hooray!!  Now its nail biting time over the cover...