Theory as a Way of Life

Antonette Talaue-Arogo

In June 2009, I went to Cornell University to attend the 33rd session of the School of Criticism and Theory (SCT). There I met Amanda Anderson, who served as Director of the SCT for the first time, succeeding Dominick LaCapra. A senior fellow and faculty at Cornell, LaCapra was a constant presence and would deliver one of the public lectures. Amanda, at that time, was teaching at Johns Hopkins University but had since joined Brown University. That it was her first year administratively was, to me meaningful, creating a sense of beginning for participants and the SCT staff alike. I found comfort in the newness that I believed everyone experienced. There was trepidation, among other emotions, on the day of the reception at the A.D. White House. Many of the eighty or so participants fell into conversation easily while I earnestly studied our schedule. I gravitated toward people who were to attend the same six-week seminar. I’d already met some of them before the formal opening as they also lived in Cascadilla Hall, a dormitory minutes away from the university. We were relatively a mixed group. There was another Filipino, Dr. Hope Sabanpan-Yu, who is currently the Director of the University of San Carlos Cebuano Studies Center. Some of the participants came from India and Spain. Many were affiliated with American universities, however. The age group differed, the fields of specialization, and life stories. There were mothers and fathers among us; individualists, too, who would travel to Africa or Asia after the SCT for further studies. I would eventually learn that there were returning students, those who already attended the SCT under different directorships and faculty. This brought great cheer as the opportunity to return and live again the experience was always open, therefore. Halfway through, I was taking solace in this fact. Verily, I fell in love with the people, the place, the program. The seminar every Monday and Wednesday mornings, or Tuesdays and Thursdays depending on which of the four core seminars you attended, the public lectures of critics, philosophers, and historians in the afternoons, and the follow-up mini-seminars the day after were deeply inspiring and inspiriting. Weekends were usually spent in the library, which was also open on Sundays! There was the regular fête after the public lectures where conversation continued over food and drinks. The intellectual flourishing that took place in the seminar rooms, the openness and daring the sessions demanded, was nurtured by trips to landmark parks, even a wine tour. Barbecues and sport events were frequently organized by both the students and faculty. And, as I experienced for the first time, there were movie screenings outdoors—“Cinema Under the Stars,” it was called—that were set up on Willard Straight Terrace. I remember that night looking down at the town lights musing that the stars were under our feet. With friends, as my classmates and residence mates had become, I watched Duck Soup, a 1933 comedy starring the Marx brothers. Another unforgettable film that I went to see, this time at the Cornell Cinema, was the documentary Examined Life (2008), which was to be my introduction to Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah, Avital Ronnell and Peter Singer, Cornel West and Slavoj Žižek. The intellectual culture was invariably social and could not have but thrived in the idyllic setting that is Ithaca.

In Ithaca, I discovered my love of walking. One of my companions had a habit of walking for an hour, sometimes two, before nightfall. I would join her on these excursions into the heart of the university, its museums and gardens, its bridges and trails, its gorges and lakes. But what I looked forward to the most was the waking to class. Jean Jacques Rousseau, credited for having written the first autobiography in the modern period, said: “There is something about walking which stimulates and enlivens my thoughts. When I stay in one place, I can hardly think at all, my body has to be on the move to set my mind going” (qtd. in L. Anderson 47). I felt walking was part of the seminar, the movement fitting to what took place in the White Hall—ideas in motion. I was in awe of the breadth of ideas, the models for how to think through ideas, the eloquence with which ideas can be articulated. It was simply exhilarating.

The core seminar I fortuitously attended was Leela Gandhi’s “On Anticolonial Metaphysics.” I consider it an act of providence for it was Michael Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg’s “Voice, Representation, Ideology” that I applied for. Having just completed my MA in Language and Literature Major in Literature degree at De La Salle University with a thesis on N.V.M. Gonzalez as a key thinker of Philippine postcolonialism, I wanted to learn something different. This choice, in hindsight, was the outgrowth of personal exhaustion with postcolonialism. However, I received my letter of acceptance from Amanda informing me that I was to attend Leela’s class. I’ve encountered her before through Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (1998), but I didn’t read the book in its entirety. A poor exercise of judgment, I would soon discover. The first time I saw Leela was during the reception when she joined our table, perhaps already knowing that everyone there would be in her company for weeks ahead. She came quietly but assuredly and, as the weeks progressed, that was how she was—her temperament, it seemed to me—an unimposing presence whose potency lies in a generosity to listen and to speak with. We introduced ourselves and very warmly, she said that she knew all of us, having read through a pile of papers, gesturing with her hands—presumably, the application form and the sample works we had to submit. That was the beginning, I thinking to myself that she was funny and that the brilliant ones usually had the best sense of humor, and it was to be the ending. Leela was scheduled to leave right after the final colloquium and, true to form, the 2009 SCT was punctuated with her words bringing to an end the passionate dialogue between the faculty and the participants for one summer: “Long live the revolution!”

It was a long time after I returned home that I could fully comprehend what transpired in Leela’s seminar. It was an idea often voiced by the participants then, that it would take six months or more before we would see how whatever we learned at the SCT would be useful to our own research. I went to Cornell University with the general, somewhat predictable idea of studying the works of Filipino critics using postcolonialism as a theoretical framework, but I did not know how to proceed. In fact, a reservation was that it would turn out a reiteration of the arguments in my MA thesis. It was especially because of my class with Leela that I realized that the wearing out of the postcolonial vocabulary—our well-rehearsed invocations of hybridity, particularly—has to do with a disablement of theory in its common transmission in the Philippines as interpretative approach. This is telling of the established view that theory is secondary to creative writing that accords it its plausibility in the practice of criticism. On this basis, theory is to a significant degree still oriented to the literary despite the emergence of cultural studies that foregrounds interdisciplinarity. The textuality in cultural studies, reading all signifying practices as texts, signals this continuing dominance of the poetic function. At SCT, there was a freedom to read theory for theory’s sake, affording pleasure glossed over in pursuit of its sociality evidenced by its applicability to literature and culture. What occurred was not a renunciation of criticism understood as theory’s field of application but a permission to patiently wrestle with a theoretical work’s language- games, trace its genealogies of thinkers embedded in relations of dominance and subalternization, map its constellations of thought, and follow its reconfigurations of problem-spaces of questions and answers through which we think out our identity, relation to reality, individual and collective experiences, and the abstract categories that inform our everyday life.1 I confess to my hesitation then and for some time to make these claims lest I be charged with what Jonathan Culler phrases “the eclipse of the literary” (5). Or what the editors of Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (2005) would consider the imperializing gesture of Theory with capital T. The theory revolution has swept academia such that students would spend more time reading Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Edward W. Said than the great works of literature. Furthermore, they read the former supposedly to help them understand the latter when what takes place are preformed lines of argumentation of either complicity with or resistance to power, diluting the complexity of the text’s processes of meaning and world-making. It was not without discomfort, therefore, that I reflected on the relation between the literary and the theoretical. Was I being myopic in my study of theory as primarily literary theory or theory of literature? Conversely, was I being disloyal to literary studies? And so, it was reassuring when Leela commenced our seminar with the overture that we were all amateurs finding “new zones of theory.” Having been sent a copy of the course outline weeks prior, I was consoled by this call to amateurism in the face of works by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Henri Bergson. There was Jacques Derrida but nothing of what I had read of him before. It was entirely an introduction to the Indian spiritualists, among them Sri Aurobindo and Sri Ramakrishna. The feeling of consolation was before long replaced with abiding admiration. Candace Lang writes about her initiation to philosophy as a senior majoring in French at Johns Hopkins: “Almost immediately, I recognized this as my kind of thinking: the analyzing, abstracting, differentiating, categorizing—hairsplitting, if you wish—that I had always delighted in” (42). From the very first session with Leela, there was an immediate recognition, akin to Lang’s experience, a knowingness that I had felt once before. It was during my first term as a Literature Major at DLSU and the class was KRITIKA, an introductory course to literary theory and criticism taught by Dr. David Jonathan Bayot. We were discussing Romanticism as analytical framework in close reading Dr. Marjorie Evasco’s poem titled “Heron-Woman.” I vividly recall thinking to myself that I would like to think that way. The criticality and creativity greatly impressed and, I now see, gave impetus to my present work on the rapprochement between theory and literature that I call critical creativity and creative criticality. It was a moment of, to borrow the felicitous phrasing of David Richter, “falling into theory.” Years later, as Leela proceeded to discourse on a new metaphysics or “postmetaphysics” as the space for dialogue between the West and the East against the background of early twentieth century imperialism, I knew with certainty that this was the kind of thinking I aspired to. I delighted in her historicizing of thought and problematization of terms, the way she synthesized paradigms. Leela speaks as she writes, titling her discussions—one part of the background she provided was titled “Drama of Dissent” and another, “Sibling Rivalry”—and telling stories, like Husserl being rendered an amateur by his student Heidegger or M.K. Gandhi on sea writing Hind Swaraj (1909) with both his left and right hands. She made theory a form of creative labor. Even her way of speaking sounded like poetry, punctuated with pauses similar to enjambments that are pregnant with meaning. And she made theory personal. It is a kind of thinking, a mode of listening, a style of speaking. Put another way, theory is a disposition, a habit of being. A personally defining moment was Leela’s definition of theory on that our first meeting: “Theory is a discipline, a spiritual exercise, a crafting of the self that cultivates an inner deportment that produces an art of living.”

To continue with a dissertation that inquires further into postcolonialism necessitated a rethinking of theory. The shift would consist in a departure from the prevailing paradigm of poststructuralism and its skepticism of subjectivity, the hermeneutics of suspicion or more commonly, in a disavowal of theory’s affects, critique. Ian Hunter, whose essay titled “The time of theory” we read first in class, sees a change in the discipline after the theory revolution of the 1960s. Theory has stood for discourses addressing issues of general interest and investment, including gender and sexuality, class, race and ethnicity, the psyche. Its history has been written as “a certain work of transformation it performs on other disciplines” (Hunter 7) in which poststructuralism displaces structuralism, structuralism transposes formalism, and so on. Such approach elides the question of the precondition for interrogation that propels theory’s development. According to Hunter, doubt about the validity of a paradigm—the critique of reified knowledges or common sense—is contingent upon a voluntary work on the self. He writes:

A technique of self-problematisation is a means of acting on oneself—on one’s perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, desires—often with a view to suspending one’s commitment to them, or withdrawing from a particular epistemic field or normative standpoint. It is a way of inducing dissatisfaction with oneself by abstaining from an existing way of thinking or living, with a view to transforming oneself into something else; into another kind of person or persona. (10)

It is the Husserlian method of reduction, or epoché, that shapes the poststructuralist persona, one who is “disdainful of natural knowledge, practicing abstention from positive categories and norms, and attuned to the imminent and immanent appearance of an ‘other’ whose unscripted presence promises liquefaction and renewal of the stale old self” (Hunter 11). Alongside Leela’s conceptualization of theory as a practice of self-cultivation, Hunter’s theoretical persona provided a model for how to do theory finally and allowed for the articulation of impasses I have reached in my study of theory. If poststructuralism disavows the autonomy of the subject, on what basis do they make the argument for and what efficacy do schools of poststructuralism have in their specifications of agency? How productive, or transformative, is the insistence on the dialectic between agency and overdetermination? Is theory’s potentiality only measured by its applicability to a text, in the poststructuralist mode of treating everything as a text? If theory is dead and so is the critic, why study? These questions were borne of a feeling of disempowerment exacerbated by increasing awareness of the precarious place of theory in education and of education in everyday living. With time’s vagaries shifting the problem-spaces within which we think and feel about the world, new questions emerge. Are there characterologies available to and in theory other than the doubtful and paranoid figure of suspicious hermeneutics? How do we reconcile metropolitan theories with subaltern realities? Is praxis actualizable?

In a paper for a graduate class I enrolled in after SCT, I submitted the idea— tentatively, in a parenthetical remark, and not without irony—that the deadlock of poststructuralism can only be overcome through conviction. I returned to this thought in the lecture titled “Becoming Cosmopolitan” that I gave as the DLSU Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center Writing Fellow for Literary Criticism in AY 2010-2011.4 I anticipated the critique of foundationalism and, especially since I was motivated by what I learned at Cornell, neocolonial scholarship. I was afraid to be called out for being anecdotal and lacking the rigor necessary for theory as an intellectual undertaking. Indeed, theory has been perceived as antithetical to the personal or the autobiographical. The devaluation of what “also go by such names as, on the one hand, personal criticism, narrative criticism, autocritography, public criticism, and personalist or experimental critical writing, and on the other, as the personal essay, writings ‘on location,’ or simply the essay” (Freedman 4) can be explained by the antisubjectivism of the theoretical turn and its cognate, the textual turn. For the theory-savvy, to draw from one’s private thoughts and feelings or personal interactions and experiences is uncritical, betraying ignorance of theoretical developments at worst and scholarly naïveté at best. It is to subscribe to expressive realism, the authority of which has already been persuasively deconstructed by psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. So dominant are these paradigms that the negative critique they deploy is readily accepted as the mediating position. For Christopher Castiglia, the critic is here both hero and victim, the latter because the critic remains subject to ideology, the trope of victimhood obscuring discursive privileges and the politics of representation, and the former because the critic can demystify the very same structure (221). This argumentative maneuver of “double gesture” (A. Anderson 61) in negative critique presupposes the critic’s capacity for critical detachment and self-reflexivity while undermining that very faculty as Western, masculinist, heterosexist, bourgeois, or, in a word, humanist. Against the cul-de-sac in theory in which resistance is always already tentative and emancipation is always already constrained, a new subjectivism emerged beginning in the 1980s in response to the limitations of identity politics that did not leave enough space for self-problematization and self-formation that may not necessarily conform with group identity. The recuperation of first-person experience informed the turn to ethics and turn to affect in theory, the paradigmatic example being Foucault’s later work on “the aesthetics of existence” impelled by the ancient view of philosophy as askēsis, “an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought” (9). The later Foucault was influenced by the historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot, for whom philosophy is generated by a vision of the world and a decision on how to live arrived at through dialogue among members of a philosophical school who encourage one another to act according to and realize this ideal of existence. Philosophical discourses form part of askēsis that, in turn, is central to “philosophy as a way of life” (Hadot). We can understand askēsis as the practice of what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises” aimed at the individual’s transformation and directed toward thought. He uses the word spiritual to suggest the idea of transcendence because these exercises allow the individual to establish a relationship with the self in the process of conversion (86). The Hellenistic schools promoted spiritual exercises in various ways. The Stoics, through “reading, meditations (meletai), therapies of the passions, remembrance of good things, self-mastery (enkrateia), and the accomplishment of duties” (Hadot 84), sought to free thought from convention and control its own processes. In the same spirit of reflective cultivation, the new subjectivism of the turn to ethics and the turn to affect reimagines critique, what is called postcritique in contemporary theory, opening it up to the range and intensities of thought styles and affective orientations that define the work of theory. “Theory,” as Leela put it, “is askēsis.” In due course, my dissertation mapped these theoretical turns in Philippine critical tradition, particularly in the oeuvres of the Cornell School comprised of Filipino scholars who received their doctoral degrees from Cornell, including Reynaldo C. Ileto, Vicente L. Rafael, and Caroline S. Hau. The renewed assessment of the humanist presuppositions of their works neglected by a postcolonial framework is made possible by the new cosmopolitanisms, a reworking of the classical and Enlightenment paradigm that is symptomatic of the internal pressure on negative critique within theory, which became the foundation for my reformulation of the moniker and its negative variation, “the Cornell Mafia” (qtd. in Veric 104), into the more positive and more hopeful, the Cosmopolitan School.

The education I gained at the SCT, it would not be inexact to say, is a bildungsroman of a kind. What I have learned is that learning theory requires maturation—intellectual and emotional—and that, in turn, necessitates living. It would take seven years after the SCT to complete my dissertation. Meanwhile, life happened: marriage, failure, and loss. The charge of irrelevance commonly leveled against theory has to do with its abstruseness and abstraction, admittedly an inclination in the field explained by its general reception as index of epistemic value and originality. Sara Ahmed, speaking about feminist theory, urges: “To abstract is to drag away, detach, pull away, or divert. We might then have to drag theory back, to bring theory back to life” (10). Fueling and mobilizing the new subjectivism in theory is, without doubt, feminism that—as at once a paradigm and a movement— is preceded by the question of how to live, and how to live freely. It is public, a collectivizing force, as it is intensely personal, embodied and enacted in choices one makes regarding one’s body, home, relationships, education, profession, and production. Ahmed unequivocally states: “The personal is theoretical” (10). Nancy K. Miller likewise discusses this incorporation of the personal and autobiographical in theoretical writing in feminist scholarship. If, as second-wave feminism affirms, the personal is the political, “eighties feminism has made it possible to see that the personal is also the theoretical: the personal is part of theory’s material” (Miller 21). Studied under the banner of autotheory, the multidisciplinary and transmedial works that continue to be generated by such exploration of the personal, the corporeal, the affective in theorizing crucially unsettle what is putatively proper research, bridging the arts and academia, indeed, creativity and criticality.

Over a decade after the SCT, in April 2021, I had a series of exchanges with Dr. Evasco as Graduate Programs Coordinator of the DLSU Literature Department regarding the course Critical Writing that she generously agreed to teach. These conversations over email happily resulted in the course’s focus on autotheoretical practices. The course syllabus that featured artists-scholars, mentees, and collaborators of Dr. Evasco, who will be invited to discuss their dissertations, is a testament to critical creativity and creative criticality as living labor. Truthfully, this was but a part of an ongoing education with Dr. Evasco that expanded in the strangest of times. Amidst immobility, ideas—and books through a moving library of sorts—were again set in motion. I see it as a continuation of that undergraduate class where I fell in love with theory. To this day, it must be said, “Heron-Woman” remains my most cherished poem by her.