The Euphoria of Theory

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, theory became a “cognitive good” throughout the American academic humanities. The rise and uses of this new high-tech good fit the “new spirit of capitalism,” to quote Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's 2018 book by the same name, a post-1960s “ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism.” A neoliberal ethos and disposition animated theory and possessed theorists, as well as spaces that circulated theory, such as the University of Minnesota's Theory and History of Literature book series, theory journals, and the University of California, Irvine's School of Criticism and Theory. Meanwhile, capitalism incorporated the nature, scope, and social effectiveness of critique by way of theory in American higher education; theorists worked in a university where neoliberal forces saturated and directed professional and intellectual protocols. The academic humanist Left's promotion of theory, for instance, facilitated the formation of the “university” as a theater for culture war conflicts, shifting attention inside and outside the academy away from underlying changes in capitalism.