I have just read the first thirty of pages of The Legitimation Crisis by Jurgen Habermas. By the first four pages it became depressingly clear that the afternoon I had set aside to read this 140 page book would not be enough time to finish it. By the twentieth page I realized that it would, in fact, require less intellectual energy, and less time to invent a time machine, go back to the 1970s and kill Habermas before he wrote the book, than it would to finish even the first two chapters. In fact it would take much less time. After disposing of Habermas’ corpse I would return to the beginning of this afternoon and spend it doing something other than reading The Legitimation Crisis. Bliss.
At Oxford theory was avoided like the plague (and Oxford, founded a few hundred years before the Black Death, would know). Aside from a skeletal methodologies class which attempted to orientate students towards classes on manuscript training and away from Foucault much of the faculty seemed convinced that theory was a distraction from the archives – a kind of intellectual Call of Duty 2 that consumed the time of otherwise promising undergraduates. In American grad schools, though, its all the rage. Indeed, many American grad students and professors openly delight in the sheer difficulty of the books they read. I remember being set Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, an awkward brambly bundle of rhetorical excess and paradoxical wordplay by a prominent intellectual history professor at Harvard. Before setting the book he rubbed his hands together and gleefully warned us to “brace yourselves, for a literature of a sometimes terrifying level of abstraction!” In a recent review of a biography of Habermas the same professor, using the same lexicon of terror, wrote that his writings “are pitched at such air-gasping heights of difficulty and place such merciless demands upon the reader as to turn away all but the most fearless.” Yikes.
As far as I can tell, books like The Legitimation Crisis serve two purposes in the humanities:
Firstly they give us all something to talk about. Theory in the Benedict Anderson sense (and here I’m falling back on theory to talk about theory!) is the print culture that creates an intellectual imagined community for the humanities. If we all only read the documents and secondary works pertaining to our increasingly miniscule crumb of expertise then we would have nothing to talk about over lunch. With theory, historians of medieval Macedonia, scholars of sexuality in late Stephen King novels and modernist architecture critics can talk to one another in a language of Foucault, Bourdieu and Butler. That is the charitable explanation anyway.
The second explanation is a little darker. Theory, and by this I mean really really hard theory, is the humanities equivalent of calculus - a language that is completely impenetrable to all those who have put in the hours necessary to decode it. Sentences like (and I, of course, quote ‘The Legitimation Crisis’), “Such forcefully integrated action systems are, of course, in need of an ideological justification to conceal the asymmetrical distribution of chances for the legitimate satisfaction of needs (that is, repression of needs)” are essentially equations that can only be solved by a trained cadre of experts. Note the offhand use the words “of course” in the middle of that sentence – a small verbal nod that says “this is grown up stuff and if you can’t understand it then either go back to college or fuck off.” Theory makes the humanities seem objectively hard. Its one of our best-kept secrets. Anyone can read a jauntily written history of, say, the Armenian genocide. Not everyone can read and understand Habermas, and those that can (and I’m not sure yet if I can include myself among them) feel like by doing so they have just run a three-minute mile. At the end of the day, then, Bourdieu is pretty much right. He is right to see the academic world as a discursively produced field in which surplus cultural capital inflicts hideous symbolic violence. And if you don’t understand that last sentence, then you may as well just fuck off.
The only difference (or there may be more) is that calculus must, necessarily, contain only one (or an equivalent class of a few) interpretation(s), it being, again by necessity, true. It's the existence of mutually inconsistent interpretations, when applied to the 'outside world' or to other theories of 'Theory' that gives you a day job. I'm not saying that renders it null and void, I'd just say that's what it does. That is what it does isn't it. That might be what Bourdieu is saying, and by extension you, subject to the suppression of the calculus analogy. Probably.
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