Theory, which once betokened an attunement or congruence with reality, now signifies a willful imposition.
My old friend Jeremy Black, the dazzlingly prolific English historian, has an excellent piece in this month’s edition of The Critic on the history profession’s newfound infatuation with “theory.” In some ways, as Black notes, the interest in theory is a sort of revival. “Theory” was all the rage in the 1980s and 1990s, not only in history but throughout the humanities.
As I have noted elsewhere, if there were a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Words, “theory” would long ago have been granted protected status as an Abused Noun. Academics wishing to use the word would be required to apply for a special license, submit character references from three persons never convicted of exposure to graduate-school education, and contribute to a fund for other unfortunate words. The case of “theory” is especially sad, because in it we have an example of serial abuse: first by the professors of literature, then the professors of history, “cultural studies,” and kindred interdisciplinary redoubts, and lately by art historians.
“Theory” has a complicated history. It derives from a Greek word meaning “to look at, behold.” “Theory” in this sense implies a certain passivity on the part of the beholder: a theory gave us access not to something we made but to something we received when properly attentive. Today, however, we use “theory” in a sense close to the opposite of this etymological meaning. A “theory” nowadays is not so much what we see or behold as a mental scaffolding we imagine or project in order to account for what we see or behold. In short, theory, which once betokened an attunement or congruence with reality, now signifies a willful imposition.
Still, in normal parlance, “theory” remains a perfectly respectable word. It has plenty of legitimate colloquial uses: “I have a theory about that,” someone says, meaning that he has an idea about what happened and why. We also regularly distinguish between theory—the way things are supposed to happen—and practice—the way they in fact do happen (the idea being that there is often a disjunction between the two). “That’s all very well in theory,” you say, meaning that in practice things are likely to turn out rather differently.
We also use “theory” in a more formal sense, meaning, as The American Heritage Dictionary explains:
Systematically organized knowledge applicable in a relatively wide variety of circumstances, esp. a system of assumptions, accepted principles, and rules of procedure devised to analyze, predict, or otherwise explain the nature or behavior of a specified set of phenomena.
“Theory” in this sense is part of the drama of rational inquiry. A theory is not just idle speculation but a carefully formulated set of hypotheses offered as a possible explanation of something. A theory has a tentative or adventurous side—it advances beyond the facts in its effort to explain them—but its legitimacy is measured primarily by its honesty and allegiance to the truth.
The truth? You can almost feel the shudder of horror cascading through the professoriate: imagine someone so naïve as to speak of “the truth”! They don’t do truth in the fashionable precincts of the academy today. They do “theory.” You even encounter people who use “theorize” as a transitive verb: “So-and-so theorizes the idea of freedom” (or art, nature, cookery, whatever), meaning that So-and-so embellishes whatever it is with a skein of owlish verbal irrelevancies. “Truth” is rarely spoken of, and then only in deprecatory scare quotes.
Have you noticed how widespread the use of those instruments of epistemic deflation is? I have mentioned it in this column previously. The practice is positively epidemic. And why not? A simpler method of neutralizing or ironizing meaning can hardly be imagined. Never speak of virtue when you can say “virtue”; a bit of reasoning is not logical, but only “logical”; the procedure in question is not sound, but merely “sound.”
And so on. It works with words of cognitive failure, too: don’t say that an argument is refuted, only that it is “refuted.” To appreciate what is at stake, consider the difference between fresh fish and “fresh” fish: the difference is difficult to define, perhaps, but easy to smell. The marvelous thing about this use of scare quotes is that it allows you to insinuate doubt without positively asserting anything at all. You don’t declare that “X” is not true, merely that “X is ‘true.’”
“Theory” in the fashionable new sense is scarcely imaginable without such weapons of semantic sabotage. And this was only to be expected. For theory as practiced in the academy today is primarily an instrument of politics, not inquiry. It is meant to insinuate a subplot of unacknowledged motives behind every declaration. When you hear—as you are always hearing these days—someone say that truth is “socially constructed,” that “knowledge is a function of power,” etc., it is a good bet that in the next sentence he is going to offer you a dollop of “theory” to support his claim.
What sort of theory? People who go in for this sort of thing are fond of asserting that “everything is political,” meaning that the ideal of disinterested inquiry is little more than a charade. How could it be otherwise, they argue, since all our acts are by definition our acts, i.e., self-interested?
Thinkers at least as far back as Joseph Bishop Butler (1692–1752) have exposed the confusion that lies behind the “strange affection in many people of explaining away all particular affections and representing the whole of life as nothing but one continued exercise in self-love.”
There are three main sources feeding the confusion. The emotional or characterological source is programmatic cynicism. The notion that selfishness is universal and unremitting is as much a matter of temperament as conviction. The idea appeals especially to those clever people who view every ideal as a blind and every value as a rationalization of some interest.
The second source of the confusion is a common but fatal logical solecism, namely the tendency to milk tautological premises for real-life conclusions. The Australian philosopher David Stove (1927–1994) drew on Butler’s classic argument when he pointed out that the “everything-is-political, all-acts-are-self-interested” attitude, though positively de rigueur among trendy academics today, rests on this fundamental logical mistake. As Stove observes,
It plainly does not follow from the tautology, “No man can act intentionally except from some interest which he has,” that “No man can act intentionally except from motives of self-interest.” That inference belongs to exactly the same class as the atrocious (though ever popular) inference from “Whatever will be, will be,” to “All human effort is ineffectual.” . . . If you set out from a tautological premise you cannot validly infer from it any conclusion which is not itself tautological.
The possible objects of a man’s interests, motives, or desires, are inexhaustibly various. Among them may be, to wreck revenge on a particular man, to gain the love of a particular woman, to serve his country, to experience the love of God, to understand contemporary physics . . . the list is endless. But it can perfectly well happen, and often does happen, that a man pursues one or more of these “particular” passions without regard to his own interests.
As Butler himself put it, “It is not because we love ourselves that we find delight in such and such objects, but because we have particular affections towards them. . . . Everything is what it is, and not another thing.”
The third main source of the conviction that “everything is political” and that truth is culpably underdressed unless it appears in deflationary scare quotes is that curiously popular form of epistemological gloominess that Stove calls “cognitive Calvinism.” “Calvinists,” Stove observes,
believe in the total depravity of human nature: if an impulse is one of ours, it is bad, because it is one of ours. The argument,
Our knowledge is our knowledge,
So,
It is not knowledge of real things,
could seem valid only to someone who felt that any knowledge we have could not be the real thing, because we have it.
Stove’s criticisms of “cognitive Calvinism” and the arguments supporting it occur in an essay attacking idealism. But it is important to note that the arguments he attacks are by no means propounded only by idealists. Indeed, in one version or another, such reasoning, as Stove points out, “is common to all the main varieties of cognophobe who now make up the staff of the faculties of arts in Western universities; and none of these is idealistic, even by implication.”
As an example, let me turn to Keith Moxey, for many years a professor of art history at Barnard College. As I noted when I first wrote about Professor Moxey, he is only a minor star in the academic firmament. But he glows with a wholly characteristic—not to say utterly predictable—light. His books are a compendium of fashionable academic clichés both in attitude (polysyllabic leftism) and in argument (off-the-rack items from the lexicon of deconstruction).
In short, Professor Moxey is a sort of five-and-dime deconstructionist, recapitulating all the standard postmodernist arguments as a music box plays its repertoire of tunes: mechanically, with a distinct lack of sonority, but also with no wrong notes. Which is why his work provides such a good introduction to the temperament and the intellectual weather of contemporary art history: there are no surprises—just pages and pages of received ideas, neatly arranged, undisturbed by anything resembling a doubt, scruple, or hesitation.
Especially pertinent is Professor Moxey’s book The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History (1994). Professor Moxey has two basic contentions in this book. You can already guess what they are. Yes: one is that no “cultural practice”—the writing of history, for example—can be understood “without reference to theory.” And the second is that “All cultural practice is shaped by political considerations.” It’s not a matter of “Where have you heard that before?” but “Where have you not?”
People who are new to this mode of argument might be tempted to ask, with respect to the first contention, precisely what theory is necessary to understand, say, Caesar’s commentaries on the war in Gaul or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Those are indubitably examples of “cultural practice” (let’s cut to the chase and call it by its old name, “history”). People have been reading and understanding Caesar and Gibbon (for example) for many, many years without even a soupçon of theory. Or have they? Perhaps people have been deluded from time immemorial and only now, fifteen minutes ago when the Age of Theory dawned, have they come to understand these (and all other) authors? What do you think?
Professor Moxey’s book raises other questions, too. For example, with respect to the second contention, one might ask exactly what “political considerations” impinge upon the study of calculus, say, or the writing of lyric poetry, or, indeed, the painting or interpretation of pictures? Between us, Professor Moxey has no good answers to these embarrassing questions—which is not surprising because there are no good answers to them. But even to ask such questions shows that you are insufficiently attuned to the theoretical Weltanschauung Professor Moxey recommends. Read on, and you will see how pointless it is to object. “Derrida has shown”—doesn’t your heart leap up at that phrase?—
Derrida has shown that language is incapable of conveying the type of meaning that is usually ascribed to historical narratives. According to Derrida, linguistic signs are arbitrary constructs whose significance is impermanent and unstable. Language functions to suggest an absent presence of meaning. That is, the meanings of linguistic representations are always illusory, since they depend on metaphysical claims that cannot be substantiated.
It would make an instructive—but also a very long—parlor game to enumerate all the things that have gone wrong in these few sentences. One might begin by asking in what sense Derrida can be said to have “shown” anything about the subject at hand. “Argued,” possibly; “contended,” no doubt. But “shown”? That word carries with it an implication of cognitive success. But has Derrida succeeded in demonstrating that “language is incapable of conveying the type of meaning that is usually ascribed to historical narratives”?
Think about that. The “type of meaning . . . usually ascribed to historical narratives” is contingent truth, as in the statement “Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C.” If Professor Moxey were right, then Derrida would have shown that such statements are “arbitrary constructs.” But of course he showed no such thing, for the simple reason that such statements are not “arbitrary constructs” but true or false depending upon the facts of the case. (Here’s another “linguistic sign”: “This bottle contains aspirin.” What if it contained arsenic instead? If Derrida had really shown that linguistic signs were “arbitrary constructs,” he could have no grounds to complain about false advertising when he swallowed the contents.) How about the assertion that “the meanings of linguistic representations are always illusory”? Either it is false, in which case we can have done with it, or it is true—in which case it is, once again, false, because it contradicts itself. Oh dear.
Professor Moxey believes that he can sidestep such difficulties (actually, they are refutations, but let that pass) by the clever expedient of giving up on truth.
Only if it is possible to get it right, to find the “truth,” can we have criteria by which to choose between alternative interpretations. If we claim there is no truth to be found, then we cannot be accused of not having a means of establishing what the truth might be.
But you might, Professor, be open to other accusations. We’ve already touched on the issue of self-contradiction. Take the claim “there is no truth to be found”—is that statement true? We’ve seen what follows if it is. And you might also, Professor, be open to the accusation of disingenuousness, preening self-importance, and a settled unwillingness to be (in Hume’s phrase) a “candid reasoner.” For if you were right, there could be no reason to prefer your interpretation over anyone else’s since ex hypothesi there are no criteria “by which to choose” one interpretation over another. (It is also worth pointing out that criteria needn’t be exhaustive to be useful: we often can discriminate between better and worse descriptions of something without necessarily having access to a perfect description.)
Of course, Professor Moxey doesn’t really believe that there are no criteria to which we can appeal in preferring one description to another. He clearly has his preferences, and he has easily enumerated reasons for his preferences. It’s just that they are not intellectual or aesthetic reasons. Like his masters Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Professor Moxey pretends that basic mental hygiene—beginning with a respect for evidence and sound reasoning—is unimportant. What matters is politics—plus a measure of self-aggrandizement—not truth. So his “criteria” are simply political desiderata. “The abandonment of an epistemological foundation for art history,” he writes, means that “historical arguments will be evaluated according to how well they coincide with our political convictions and cultural attitudes.” How about his students’ art history papers? Were they, too, “evaluated according to how well they coincide” with Professor Moxey’s “political convictions and cultural attitudes”? How could it be otherwise, if Professor Moxey is right? It’s something that parents may wish to ponder as they make out their tuition checks.
The bottom line: since we no longer care about truth (that’s what Professor Moxey means by abandoning an “epistemological foundation”), we can accept or reject arguments solely on the basis of whether they accord with our political interests. It follows that art history—like all forms of “cultural practice”—is at its bottom “a form of political intervention” that takes part in “the processes of cultural transformation which characterize our society.”
Now political intervention can be a good thing; it can be a bad thing. It depends, obviously, on the nature of the particular intervention. But is political intervention, be it ever so beneficent, something with which our professors of art history should concern themselves in their capacity as professors of art history, i.e., as teachers and scholars?
It is also worth asking exactly what sort of politics Professor Moxey advocates. As it happens, it is in answering this—or, rather, in assiduously failing to answer it—that Professor Moxey for once demonstrates some moxie. For although he early and often indicates his distaste for “conservatives,” he is impishly evasive when it comes to spelling out what sort of “political intervention” he favors. He calls for “a politically committed form of art historical interpretation” but says almost nothing about the nature of that commitment beyond “recognizing that politics is concerned with issues of race, class, and gender.” Since political fashions change quite rapidly, Professor Moxey’s vagueness is prudent. Clearly he is “on the Left,” hence the mantra about “race, class, and gender.” But that is hardly more than an empty shibboleth, a bit of ideological flag-waving. Professor Moxey’s call for a “politically committed” art history that leaves the nature of the commitment unspecified and the very possibility of history in doubt may be intellectually fatuous, but it is politically cunning, for it enables him to absorb many minor adjustments in political orientation without ceasing to be “cutting edge.”
Keith Moxie is but a tiny blip on the radar screen of higher education in the more fashionable precincts of the academy today. But he, as I say, is a wholly characteristic one. Jeremy Black is to be congratulated for reminding us how widespread and intellectually damaging this revival of “postmodernist hash” has been.
Roger Kimball
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/09/06/the-trouble-with-theory/
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