Liturgy in Purgatory: On the Discussion of Theory Between Daniel Tutt and Catherine Liu
In this essay, Roberts gives a review of a discussion pondering the age old question; is there too much Theory on the Left?
Marshall McLuhan is a current obsession of mine, and as I read through his work, I find myself more aware of the way mediums affect the messages they present by embodying them. For some things, this is truly an improvement, but I can side with McLuhan's pessimism on the role of medium for one activity; no matter which medium it goes into, debate and discussion never get better. They only get harder to avoid.
And thus, I bare my prejudices to you; like Wilde's Lord Henry Wotton, I do not argue; arguing is the activity of the intellectually lost. Those like Ben Burgis, who have made a career out of such wanderjahr, do so not out of conviction but from a desire to be talked about. If you want to entertain an intellectual, give them an argument. If you want to anger them, keep it to yourself.
And yet, here I am writing about a debate--I'm sorry, 'a discussion'--between the virtue ascetic Catherine Liu and the Pangloss of French Theory Daniel Tutt, who discussed the role of theory in Left politics. I will admit to a sort of skepticism about this, when the Good Doctor Monroe sent me the video. At first, I had assumed that Monroe wished to share a laugh with me--there is far too much to laugh at in a debate. Especially on the Left, the members who are thrust into the dim spotlight, often on the fritz, tend to be little more than street corner preachers, shouting at the downtrodden about the du jour idea of the moment--one always dated to some period between 1807 and 1968. Debates and discussions tend to be wrestling matches in the mud, and the crowd's primitive need for entertainment overcomes one's modern need for dignity.
Another reason I almost passed on this is that I do not have a dog in this fight--or rather, to be more accurate, I do not have a dog at this racetrack. I do not like the priests of High Theory, the arrogant après garde of a fictitious vanguard, who believe their accounting of every sinful solecism and misunderstanding makes their subfusc worthy of the collar of a priest. The only similarity, it seems, is the indulgences they take whilst they harangue the poor and workers--they benefit from the capitalism they tell us we ought to oppose. The only difference I assign to the professor or the college educated jackass in this country, as opposed to the usual or proletarian jackass, is that they are better trained. Through a routine of treats and punishment, these sorts have learned a few things that they will use to judge the world for the rest of their life. They think that they are unlike the starving dogs, only because they have made it to the breed shows.
And yet, I am not one to take the PMC thesis as a serious one. This can--and probably will--be written about later, but I find the PMC thesis and its acolytes to be a form of anti-intellectualism that is married to a kabal-style conspiracy theory. It is a belief of the pint-of-Pinot proletariat; that is, the self styled proletariat who wants so bad to be seen as on the side of the worker that they will create enemies that they--and you too, if you subscribe--will be able to accurately diagnose and combat. It might be said to be a bad habit of the polemicist, but they have a tendency to set up a target dummy so fantastical that, at least for a while, they do not run out of something to fight. Neither do I have the required faith in the proletariat that this sort of theory requires; that if the experts would just get out of the way, the workers could see things as they are, organize, and rise up, all their clear reasoning sung to the sound of a Woody Guthrie song. In a time of crisis, this theory has taken hold only because the decline of the Western world is so evident that people want to believe it is not that bad, that the experts are exaggerating. Thus, by uniting a dislike of virtue (which I favor) and a dislike of intellectualism, one gets this cobbled together explanation, draped in Marxist language. This is not, I think, Liu's thesis but this is what the PMC thesis has mutated into.
But Monroe insisted. And noting that I had only a little knowledge of both sides of this debate, I decided to give this a chance. The absolute opposition of Catherine Liu's Martin Luther style directness and Daniel Tutt's la vie mentale gave off the promise of violence; and, if not, at least one might get a show. That, and the fact that this was a debate I had seen scuttled about the cyberspace landscape, with the digital illiterates making a mess of it in their incoherent shouting matches, is what made me curious. Perhaps, if Liu and Tutt expressed some eloquence, I could see what was going on.
There is a lot that went on in this conversation. Frankly, any conversation longer than an hour and thirty minutes is a crime--someone is either lying or very confused, and both are a waste of time.
Catherine Liu and Daniel Tutt's conversation, clocking in at 2 hours and 2 minutes, might be criminal, but there were moments of interest for someone like me; that is, a writer of a literary valency. But I have split what has been discussed into two parts, because as one knows three of anything, of course, pays in Misfortune.
That misfortune notwithstanding, I cannot cover everything--I refuse to be tedious. So I will cover what interests me, and I will do my best to express my opinion on this, a liturgy in purgatory.
* *
Let us begin with the first dog fight that took place--albeit, 'dog fight' is much too kind. It seems that one of Daniel Tutt's contributions was to show that target dummies, too, can be stylish; if he had on some tweed, it might have provided better protection.
This first dog fight was about the Scriptures--that is, whether French Theory was worthy of being part of the gospel, even as it was critical of the Holy Ghost, universalism, as well as having sinned in the name of identitarianism.
To rise to this challenge, Daniel Tutt began with romanticism--ah, what a time it was, to be around when the French theorists were being dragged about this country like a Kardashian handbag. There was once a 'hunger' for French Theory, he notes. One expected a dreamy sigh, a staring off into space, and a cut to a montage of Derrida shaking hands with people, with his trademark pipe.
Adding onto this wistful point, Tutt tact on a thesis; that French Theory's importance was based on the fact that it 'helped us read texts differently'. Luckily for a viewer like myself, he finally let Catherine Liu speak; a mistake he might have regretted but which I found nothing but joy from for the rest of the discussion.
Liu rounded on Tutt, giving context to his starry eyed reminiscence; that the French Theorists were not paraded about like heroes, but were traded like Pokémon cards between universities. They were not seen as subversive and thus desired, they were seen as shiny and thus needed for universities to get their hands on tuition money. Liu even references her own university, which she added with some irony had become a STEM and biological science oriented college, who pushes the humanities further and further down its wish list each Christmas. Even when Tutt interrupted to mention Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, Liu had no trouble reminding her target dummy that these people were pragmatists and, desiring 'influence in the institution' brought out the French Theorists to do so.
The real disagreement begins when Tutt, after muttering for a moment about the 'masterly guest' that was Jacques Derrida (one might think of Ben Franklin's famous apothegm about fish here), Tutt offered a new thesis--that French Theory diversified the universities. To this, Tutt tries to play two sides; it was 'the identitarian ends' of French Theory that did this, and yet these identitarians were truly 'post-identitarian' ends. I shared Liu's sigh at this point, as well as remembered a Mencken quote--that our pedants are often great logicians--and our diligent disseminators of nonsense.
Once Tutt put down this mantle, Liu immediately picked it up--and began swinging. She noted that the identitarian ends of French Theory had many illegitimate children, like gender studies and trauma studies. She pushed him and said that the very thrust of this sort of project was 'anti-universalist', making it incompatible with the Marxist project, which is universalist. She, in effect, questions whether French Theory is worthy of criticizing Marxism, as it shares not only a divergent project, but an opposing project to Marxism.
Tutt's response devolves into a textual dick measuring contest; he asserts this and that about Deleuze, Liu asks for a specific example of Marxism from Anti-Oedipus, Tutt gives an account with so many caveats, one wonders if this is a debate on French Theory or if someone is angling to get out of a prenup. Between apologetics, like stating French Theory is an invention of America, and changing his position a few times, Tutt might have explained a great deal of Deleuze but he never hit back at why French theory gave any good revisions of Marxism.
As it stood, Liu held that the Frankfurt School was more worthy of interpreting the holy writ of Marxism than French Theory, noting how the former had moved into the works of people like Mike Davis or acted as a bridge into contemporary accounts of things like surveillance capitalism. Tutt seemed to offer little more substantiation and a demand we 'return to the texts' to know the truth, rather than accept that French Theory had mutated into neoliberalism.
* *
There was quite a bit of back and forth, but eventually Tutt gave up and moved on, his romanticism damaged. They finally agreed on one thing; monks are good. However, with this agreement came more disagreement; on whether the 'libertine Left', found through French Theory, was truly a form of Leftism that needed to be catered to, or if they were of a bygone era. I guess there is something about monks that turns one's mind to the scandalously vulgar.
This part of the discussion actually began earlier, as Liu recounted a book, La Famialia Grande by Camille Kouchner, writing about her father Bernard Kouchner and discussed how the 1968 movement, particularly its more libertine parts, were most likely more in response to the oppressive nature of French Catholicism than it was a revolutionary idea, even as French Theorists dressed it up as such.
But this arose again, as Tutt noted how French Theory 'went wrong'. He pointed out that the 'libertine ideas of 68' were co-opted by everyone from businesses to the IDF. You have to hand it to Tutt; I know of no one else who gives nuances so detailed that they successfully argue against their own selves. I say this, of course, because he follows this up with a platitude; 'ideas matter'. If he demonstrated anything with his assertion about the ideas of soixante-huitards ideas being co-opted, it is that they do not really matter as much as we think they do.
Undeterred by his own contradictions, Tutt puts forth his defense; 'do you think Deleuze and Guattari would be celebrating this?' Would they, he asks, be celebrating the co-opting of their own ideas? He pads this with reference to them getting their idea of 'lines of flight' from George Jackson, arguing that the libertine Left, being co-opted for various business and military operations, was a 'tragic outcome'.
Unfortunately, at first, it seemed that the response to this by Liu was to go back to nitpicking psychoanalytic terms from a part of their discussion that I found neither interesting or necessary--I find people who think the world is shaped like a giant psyche that functions from psychoanalytic concepts as being just as delusional as those who think that the world works via theoretical 'ideas'. But, as a matter of fact, this return was only momentary, as Liu circled back to their talk of the libertines, noting that their love of regression and infantilization makes their ideas inherently bad, that the 'tragic outcome' Tutt assigns to the misuse of Deleuze and Guattari was not a misuse but a logical end to those ideas. Putting an exclamation point on it, Liu adds, making me chuckle, that she does not think 'rolling around with other eggs' will help us, and that we should 'return to Freud', but not through Lacan.
Tutt tries to calm everything down, noting this was a 'conversation' and that he is 'not endorsing these views'--to which one might wonder, what is the point of this if he has not endorsed some view? He notes that to answer whether he endorses the view or not is too complex to say yes or no that he does. Such waffling, to me, felt odd; I had no idea Daniel Tutt was running for office. And judging by Liu's facial expressions, as he went on explaining the nature of revolutionary subjectivity as 'decoding', I do not think he was convincing.
But this calm ends as he talks of offering 'an olive branch' to the libertine communities, to use it to keep them in the fold. Liu immediately asks for which communities or organizations Tutt is referring to, and Tutt names names; the Family Abolition movement and the transgender Marxist movements. But whereas I expected him to give another long bilet-doux to Deleuze, instead I watched Tutt make his first practical argument; we should be nice to the libertines, or they might call us 'red-brownists'.
To this, which is barely on topic but interesting enough to know, Liu rightly scuttled Tutt's point. Noting that she had been called these names and survived, Liu notes that the point is not to cater to any group as much as build a mass movement. Further, she noted that the libertine Left seems content with 'being subcultural', rather than taking on the hegemonic ideology of capitalism. Liu then notes that she believes there must be something normative for there to be any true transgression, before pointing out that she thinks that Tutt's argument fits her view of the PMC--expressing that he was less interested in revolution than he was in managing factions. As if on cue, there was a dinging sound from one of their computers, as though this were Jeopardy and someone had gotten the answer right.
I would recount what Tutt had to say, but it seemed not to matter, because his pushback was framed as questions but they never seemed to rise to responding to Liu; it was, at best, Tutt asking for Liu to be nice to others, to be 'progressive' about sexualities, all while trying to also cover his face, in fear of being lashed at again by a 'polemical spirit'. To this end, nothing changed, and Liu seemed to have won the day; the libertine impulse on the Left seemed, to her, less a revolutionary response than a reactionary one born from the repressive nature of French Catholicism. It was a reactionary impulse that was at home in French Theory, and one that had birthed bastardized movements in Gender Studies and Trauma Studies.
And Tutt never seemed able to respond to this.
* *
I have always wondered what it might have been like to be on the sidelines at a debate at the Ancient Greek Academy or Aristotle's Lyceum, listening as the likes of Xenocrates debate how well one might access truth, or listen to Dicaearchus discuss the politics of Ancient Greece. This fantasy is always accompanied by the most unrealistic version of myself; that is, as a good listener who causes no trouble and behaves himself. I am far closer to Diogenes and, more specifically, Bion of Borysthenes--I would chuck a chicken over the wall or, as Lucian put it for Bion, 'deck philosophy with bright-flowered robes'. To borrow modern terminology, I have problems with authority--intellectual or otherwise.
This discussion was nothing of the sort, so no fantastical subject need be imagined. This was, frankly, more a rerun of the Reformation. If, of course, you could have gotten Martin Luther and Pope Leo X in a room together without them killing each other--in the name of God and his son, Jesus, of course.
In this case, the roles--the fight between priest and pastor, canon and theses, text and faith, has its own dunamis; it is the theorists who, preaching to the text and demanding Tutt's 'thorough and critical' understanding of the ideas of French Theory belong closer to the Catholic tradition that they, as Liu noted, fought against. This is set against a more Lutheran sort of take via Liu--that one ought not revise Marx, but have faith that Marxism on its own (or, at most, mediated through the Frankfurt School) is the text one needs to push for revolutionary ideas.
From Tutt, we get a sing-song kind of alacrity for 'the text', imbued with a nostalgia for past popularities. This romanticism is tied to a sort of extravagant couvade, an insistence that these texts have some sort of truth, belonging to a canon that displaced all others. One is invited into French Theory as the lesser son of some noble was invited into a monastery; with a disdain for the ignorant, who must be educated. How dare I, a plebian simpleton, attempt viewing the ideas of Marxism without the proper textual analysis of Michel Foucault? Or Derrida? Or Deleuze? Don't I know things are more complicated than that? God speaks to his chosen ones, not to their followers--vox scholar, vox dei. The theorists of our time, meaning to or not, formed our new theologians…at least on the Left.
From Liu, I am reminded of a phrase I picked up from Schopenhauer; primum vivere, deinde philosophari. Live first, then philosophize! Schopenhauer recited this with disdain, but it seems to me that Liu believes in this spirit. She is not against a text or reading a text; after all, she has written a few of them. But her writing, as Tutt noted at various points as did she, are polemical. She writes as though she were at war, as the Ancient Greek word polemics is derived from, polemikos, suggests. And, it seems, she talks as she writes--with a hammer. It is about the mass movements, it is about the usefulness of the text the theorists hold as summa potestas. You do not need the texts, except for Marx, to whom you must have faith in, a fidelis ad urnam. This faith is, I think, driven by the fact that Liu is also not unaware of, and perhaps more disturbed by, the indulgences of the modern and postmodern theorist--that they seek out isolation from the workers, taking part in capitalism, while lecturing the workers. Her belief in the PMC thesis, and using it to execute poor Mr. Tutt, attests to this.
The trouble with the war of the faith, though, is that it is ultimately not about any truths. If you ask me who 'won' the debate, I will tell you that Catherine Liu cleaned up. Everything Tutt said was answered clearly, with references, and with more than a little humor. She kept, as she noted, bringing Daniel Tutt back to Earth--but a more concerned observer may have asked if she had to bring him down so hard.
But if you ask me who’s right, I would be torn. I will dare to say I am, as a Sartrian existentialist, in a unique spot to give an opinion. First, Jean Paul Sartre was rejected, in equal part, by the Communists and the French Theorists--from Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze's specific rejection to the fact that the PCF was hostile to Sartre to the various ham-fisted attempts to connect existentialism to fascism, Sartre and the existentialists since then, as they dwindle, have never been at home in either side of the faith. As Sartre noted, and as I concur, communism is something I like, but communist intellectuals are savages.
Theory, to me, is not the worst thing, and it should be obvious to anyone that Marxism needs revision. Not only were Marx's texts written in the 1800s, and thus need modern eyes to look them over, it must be the first principle of anyone reviewing anyone to note that the authors we revere are humans. To put a twist on Anaxagoras' cold assessment of his son's death, one must know they have read a mortal. And many theorists do this well--at their best, a theorist is someone who seeks to understand so that they might correct lapses of the human mind. One can see this in, say, Horkheimer and Adorno. It is when, having set forth on this journey, that they begin to gate-keep that there is a problem. Oddly enough, it is never usually the theorists themselves who do this, but their most adherent fangirls taking mutated versions of their ideas and play dodgeball.
But there is a time when you have read enough. There are times when the jargon used is so empty, yet so heavy, that the fresh air outside is needed. When one must exercise their minds, put them to the test--not of collecting, but of experimenting! As Nietzsche said: to a thinker, their actions are experiments, questions towards finding something out. Or, as is more often the case, a thinker might find themselves between interpretations, unable to discern the truth--and at some point, as Sartre would note, one must choose. And yet, I am sensitive to bad faith; in this case, on this side of the faith, bad faith in regards to the diagnosis and analysis of the world. To be so sure that Marx, or Marx plus Frankfurt, is the way to the truth is often disturbing. I would advocate holding on to Marx's methods but maybe having questions about his conclusions, or some doubts at least. Isms, whatever it is, are like guns in a holster; have a good enough grasp of them to be able to use them, but not so quick on the trigger that you shoot yourself in the foot.
Theory, to me, is more a check on bad faith, while actions are what one must do to reveal the truth. To join in the psychoanalytic back and forth of Tutt and Liu, from Bion's perspective theory is meant to be dispelled at times so we might get to the truth, so we might see things as they are. Theory is, then, the applying of a way of thought until it has lost its ability to help, when theory becomes an eyesore instead of an eye drop. But, more often than not, it must be ignored for reality so that we might bring it back in to make sense of something. As Sherlock Holmes says, in A Scandal in Bohemia:
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
So, to answer the rhetorical and incompletely written question of the video: Is there too much theory on the Left? No. There is just too much faith.
And not enough thinking.
I agree that Catherine Liu mopped the floor with Daniel Tutt. However, I don't think that Deleuze and Guattari should be disregarded completely. They come up with some very intriguing concepts that are very much like what the Nietzsche quote in the article says about the thinker. There's also a quote of Nietzsche's that Deleuze used in, at least, a couple of books:
"Nature propels the philosopher into mankind like an arrow; it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere."
That is kind of the essence of Deleuze's thought I think. He fires multiple arrows in multiple directions just trying to dig for some new idea that will stick to a target and cause the arrow to be fired again, but the next time, with a better idea of a target. Deleuze is a philosopher and that is the extent of his revolutionary potential. He is like a farmer broadcasting seeds. I think that people felt this deperation at the end of the 20th century for a novelty of ideas. Not really taking the time to dig into reality itself because collectively the West turned inward to itself. In its insularity it became as the proverbial Ouroborous or even more gruesomely like the Human Centipede. Just the same old rehashing of old ideas and the people like Deleuze and Guattari felt around in the dark for solid forms to lay their hands on, but maybe most, if not all, were but cobwebs.