There’s a blistering critique in Gary Hall’s Masked Media of what he terms, drawing on McKenzie Wark’s account of the novel, bourgeois theory. As he puts it on pg 185, bourgeois theory is rendered unserious and slightly ridiculous by being stuck in antiquated modes which leave it unable to address new conditions. To the extent it tries to address these conditions, it does so in a deeply superficial way:
Bourgeois theory clearly ‘isn’t working’, then. The nonhuman, anthropogenic climate breakdown, ecocide, the Anthropocene: all exceed what the form of proper theory can currently express. Like the novel, theory has not adapted to the new reality ushered in by the Anthropocene, including all those laws and legal decisions that are starting to pile up around the question of the rights of nature. (For sure, the last thing bourgeois legacy theorists want is for any of this to actually impact on their own ways of performing as great authors.) Instead, theory ‘imposes itself on a nature it cannot really perceive or value’ (Wark 2017d). Just as ‘serious fiction, like bourgeois culture, now seems rather unserious, indeed frivolous’, so too does serious theory (2017d). The nonhuman may be what a lot of contemporary theory studies and writes about, but it cannot take seriously the implications of the nonhuman for theory. As a result, the current landfill of theoretical literature on the Anthropocene is merely a form of bourgeois liberal humanism smeared with nonhuman filler – objects, materials, technologies, animals, insects, plants, fungi, compost, viruses, microbes, stones, geological formations – to make it appear otherwise.
He frames a concern with biography as quintessentially bourgeois but a reflexivity in regards to practice as anti-bourgeois. The problem I see is that this draws the boundary of what constitutes anti-bourgeois theory so restrictively that I’m not sure who, other than Gary Hall some of the time, actually falls within it. It’s a combination of impacting upon actual practice, one’s own and that of others, but furthermore doing so in a conceptual mode predicated upon the evacuation of the inherited conceptual legacies which inevitably litter thought and speech. From pg 143-144
The performance of serious theory today is therefore as formally limited to bourgeois liberal humanism as the novel. (As Wark says in her earlier text on Moretti and the bourgeois novel: ‘It is about making something of this world, not transcending it in favor of another’. When it comes to the ‘bourgeois sensibility’ there is no adventuring into the unknown, ‘no spontaneous bravery’, ‘“few surprises”’. It might be ‘hard work’, being a bourgeois writer or theorist, then, ‘but it’s a steady job’ [2013].)79 This means that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for even the most radical of political theories to do anything other than exclude the diversity of human and nonhuman presences. To sample and remix Wark’s text on the novel in the Anthropocene in order to further undercut notions of the author as self-identical human individual: anything that would actually impact on the concealment of theory’s established scaffolding, how it is created, disseminated and monetised, is regarded as not proper, eccentric, odd and risks banishment. ‘But from what? Polite bourgeois society?’ (2017d). The for-profit world of Verso books and Routledge journals where proper theory is to be found?
My love/hate relationship with Gary Hall’s work comes, I think, from sharing aspects of his critique of bourgeois theory but finding avant-garde theorising even more off putting. Firstly, it imagines itself as standing outside of the circuits of (academic) accumulation whereas the valorisation of conceptual and linguistic novelty is a primary strategy to accumulate status and prestige within significant parts of the academy. Secondly, it takes what can sometimes feel like a sneering stance towards accepting the doxa of the field, misconstruing a necessary condition of working within a social field as a failure of cultural imagination. It’s another variation of the ‘sociology as a calling’ / ‘scholarship as a vocation’ tendency which I’ve come to see as deeply psychically pernicious, postulating a sphere of autonomous enjoyment (good thing) which I suspect for many people is functionally a disavowal of the conditions of their own labour (bad thing). Thirdly, it hinders the emergence of a middle ground between these two categories by predicating the cultivation of scholarly reflexivity under changing sociotechnical conditions (i.e. the project which animates my educational work) upon a particular style of conceptualising those conditions.
It bundles together two moves which I don’t think are necessarily connected and I suspect are probably antithetical to each other. It’s a heavily aestheticised mode of concept-work geared towards the hyperactive (and implicitly) competitive production of linguistic and conceptual novelty. Whereas if we see it as desirable that we do work which, to use Hall’s work, would “actually impact on the concealment of theory’s established scaffolding, how it is created, disseminated and monetised” this raises the question of the relationship between theory and this outcome. I’m persuaded enough by Jana Bacevic’s core thesis (see also) that it seems obvious theory does not and could not automatically produce this outcome. Hence the question of the relationship, as well as our meta-theoretical, methodological and reflexive relationship to that relationship, which are exactly the things I think Hall’s approach unintentionally obfuscates alongside what can at other points be examples of remarkable lucidity.
I admire Hall’s real impact through the many initiatives he’s played a leading role in but I struggle to see how his theoretical approach helps those undertakings and suspect it might actually hinder them. There are modes of theorising between the bourgeois and the avant-garde which, it seems to me, could more directly serve these purposes.
(Plus when a billion people worldwide are regularly using the most sophisticated machinery for conceptual and linguistic novelty that has ever existed, the quality of that novelty becomes even more important than it has been previously)
Mark Carrigan 