How Theory Took Over the World - The Atlantic

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Separating facts from lies, and real thoughts from fabrications, can seem more difficult than ever: Words and images are easily faked, and some writers at every stage—students, academics, novelists—are letting machines do the work for them. The author may as well be dead. Ubiquitous cameras are eroding human privacy, creating the sense that we live in a panopticon. And across many popular platforms, information is often shorn of context, if not outright false.<br>The fact that I feed my kids and pay my rent as a novelist and teacher likely intensifies the queasiness I feel at these developments. Yet my profession also helps me understand that the idea of society coming apart might be the oldest story in the world. In the second half of the previous century, a group of mostly French theorists made this kind of instability their main subject. Systems built by humans were overpowering our ability to make choices, they explained. Society and language, the scaffolding on which our reality was built, were made up and farcical.<br>I read these guys—mostly guys, often grouped together as structuralists and post-structuralists—in college, and they baffled and entranced me. After a mediocre high-school education spent checking boxes, the thrill of thinking, of elbowing my way through something hard and complicated, felt like coming to life. Trudging doggedly through these difficult, abstruse ideas—roughly 67 percent of which I felt sure I didn’t understand—made the world feel sharper, different. Twenty years later, looking back on their (not inaccurate) cultural diagnoses generates a complicated feeling: I’m reminded of that seductive sensation of stretching one’s brain, even as I hear speculation that artificial intelligence might one day make thinking obsolete.<br>The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory<br>By Eakin, Emily

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No book better captures this paradox than The Frenchmen, Emily Eakin’s new book about her encounters with post-structuralist ideas. Eakin entered college as an aspiring academic, but went on to spend her adult life in journalism (she is an editor at The New York Times). Yet despite her experience in two unstable fields, and her focus on thinkers who proclaimed, among other things, “the death of the author,” her book is filled with life. Every page contains evidence of deep research, an eye for telling details, and the pleasure that can comes from sprawling, sometimes consternating thought.<br>The Frenchmen opens as a sort of intellectual bildungsroman: At Harvard in the late 1980s—and especially in the classrooms to which Eakin gravitated as an undergraduate—French theory was the rage. It seemed both exclusive and rebellious. The protests of the ’60s seemed to be a distant memory, Ronald Reagan was president, and large portions of the population were quietly ignoring the thousands of deaths caused by AIDS. “In an era of complacency and self-satisfaction,” she writes, “theory was a symbol, however small, of intellectual nonconformism, a badge, like a pink mohawk, that marked you as a member of the counterculture, different from—and critical of—the docile horde.” Like so many college kids before her, Eakin, the child of two English-Ph.D. holders from Indiana, came to campus feeling ineffectual and small. The spirit of the times only amplified that impression, but the sheer force and seeming certainty of these fashionable thinkers gave her a sense of power.<br>Read: The theory that explains Trump’s UFC fight<br>Before long, Eakin comes to the titular French writers: Jacques Lacan (1901–81), Roland Barthes (1915–80), Louis Althusser (1918–90), Paul de Man (1919–83), Gilles Deleuze (1925–95), Michel Foucault (1926–84), Félix Guattari (1930–92), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). I gave you the dates of their lives because, in Eakin’s telling, they really matter. Having led the reader into their ideas through her own experience, she illustrates how impossible it is to separate any individual thinker’s theories or discoveries from the time in which they lived. This seems obvious, maybe, but in fact it contradicts these philosophers’ core belief in the irrelevance of biography. And to the extent that our lives often feel disembodied today—so much time spent staring at screens—Eakin’s approach is not just a refreshing way of explaining ideas, but also a reminder to readers that we are physical beings first.<br>One of the primary tenets of most of the Frenchmen was that facts and meaning were difficult to pin down. There was only the text, over which the writer had little control. Even the self was ultimately an unstable text. “Within the structuralist framework,” Eakin explains, “an author was held to be of little account, a ‘fiction’ perpetrated by the ‘linguistic system,’ so it was easy to ignore the philosopher” and instead “focus exclusively on his words.” Eakin’s goal is the opposite: “to re-embody these men—to recover the hidden human element...