by Jon Lackman | 8 May 2008 | Theory
In the May 2008 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, Katy Siegel interviews Richard Shiff (her former Ph.D. advisor):
["What are the issues at stake when a historian becomes a critic?"] … I would fault many of my contemporaries for romanticizing the present by seeing it through moments of past history. They either understand the past era better, or, more likely, have simply romanticized it by identifying it with a figure they wish were right beside them in the present time. Walter Benjamin is a critical writer I myself admire for his remarkable acumen, but I wouldn’t apply his politics to the politics of our own time—it won’t work.
["What do you see as the pitfalls of theory?"] The problem with theory is that it often does little more than provide terms of generalization, as when we dismiss a view because we classify it as “Cartesian” or “patriarchal” or dismiss an argument because we classify it as “idealist” or “dialectical.” We let the classification make our decision, rather than asking whether the view or the argument is getting a job done regardless of its likely classification … We get into intellectual trouble when we begin to believe what we theorize.
[Could you talk a bit about the development of theory in art writing of the past 30 years or so, from your participatory vantage point?] Like so many other Americans, I quickly developed a liking for Derrida and de Man during the late 1970s … Sometimes you have to resolve to resist your own intellectual tendencies. You can decide arbitrarily to move to the side of what attracts you and attracts most everyone else. A simple but effective strategy is to look for alternative sources of philosophical or theoretical stimulation, sources that answer the same need. No body of thought is so original that you won’t find something like it somewhere else (or maybe our ingrained habit of thinking analogically causes us to think so). An alternative—Peirce instead of, say, Deleuze—will help you avoid falling into one of the patterns of authoritative argumentation that, for better or worse, identifies your generation. It’s easier to have a personal reading of a text when it’s one that few of your peers are reading. Peirce isn’t obscure, but some of the parts of Peirce that seem most interesting to me are rarely used. I sometimes take a book from my library shelf at random and let it inspire the next stage of an unfinished essay … It keeps you from developing too many intellectual habits. You avoid formulaic answers to interpretive questions.
