Date: Wed, 22 Jun 1994 12:38:45 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Currie K. Thompson" <Currie.K.Thompson-AT-cc.gettysburg.edu>
Subject: Re: the uses of theory
To: film-theory-AT-world.std.com


     Ashraf Youssef's post and responses to it have struck some
chords and has made me review my own experience with theory in the
humanities.
     My doctorate, which I received in 1973, is in Romance Languages.
Although my research has focused on literature (and recently on 
Argentine cinema), when I began my graduate studies in 1965, I took
some courses in linguistics.  Many of my colleagues who also took
these courses hated them, and one of their reasons was the specialized
vocabulary (allophone, phoneme, allomorph, morpheme, etc.) involved.
The vocabulary--jargon--was, in their view, dense, and the concepts it
recpresented were hard to grasp.  My reaction was entirely different.
I found the concepts precise and enlightening.  When they were applied
to different languages, they clarified for me many areas of confusion
in a way that the previous explanations of linguistic phenomena
never could have.  In sum, I developed an intense enthusiasm for linguistic
theory.  But I was primarily interested in literature, and the program
I was in was geared to take me in that direction.
     But very soon after the initial courses in linguistics, structuralism
hit.  When I learned that structuralism supposedly applied linguistic 
theory to the study of literature (and other areas), I was eager to learn
all about it.  The study of literature at the time was extremely vague
and subjective, and I hoped that structuralism would bring a sense of
clarity and order, just as it in linguistics.
     Alas, my experience did not match my expectations.  As I read
structuralist--and a little later, post-structuralist--literary theory,
I frequently encountered vocabulary that seemed to muddle and confuse
rather than to clarify.  Sometimes, I am now aware, the vocabulary was
misused by people who were swept up by something new and throwing terms
around but who really did not know what they were doing.  At other times
what I read made sense but struck me as pointless.  I continued to read
this type of theory, but for some time I did not incorporate any of what
I read in my own scholarly writing.
     Not that my own scholarly writing was exactly free of theory.  I became
interested in psychoanalysis--first Freud and his circle, then Jung and his
people, and later Lacan and company.  My writing was an eclectic combination
of rhetorical analysis, history, and psychoanalytic theory.  To me psycho-
analytic theory made a lot of sense.  I found it as enlightening as I had
linguistic theory earlier.  In both cases, the theory imposed order on a 
domain of chaos.  But, of course, I am aware that for some people--including
some scholars--psychoanalytic theory is worthless or worse.
     And, of course, somewhere about the time I made the shift from Jung to
Lacan, I also began to incorporate other post-structuralist theory in my 
thought and my writing.
     But I am far from having reached a conclusion on this issue.
And I could not even begin to answer Ashraf Youssef's question:
>   Now, what is a useful measure of the importance of theory in film
> or literature?  
     I think that in order to answer this question, we would need to
answer another one first: Why do we study film or literature?  And that
question supposes we understand clearly the terms "film" and "literature"--
and they turn out to be quite complex when we attempt to define them.
     And perhaps, since we are dealing with the humanities, we need
to address another question, which turns out to be virtually impossible:
What makes us human?  What is the essence of humanity?  Certainly, in 
all theory that seemes to be a crucial issue.  The term "suture," for
example, seems to imply that being human involves a type of hurt and
that "suture" is a type of closure that (temporarily, at least) assuages
that pain.  Based on the posts I have read and on the few pages on the
concept I have read in an introduction to film theory, I gather that the
term is related to Lacan's term "castration."
     But the meaning of that term is itself far from immediately 
apparent, and my understanding of it is based on a lot of reading.
(My understanding, at least, is that Freud used the term "castration"
in its usual sense; then Jung and Neumann elaborated it--and distinguished
between "primary" and "secondary castration"--so that "castration" 
became a symbolic break in human development, the loss of what they
called "participation mystique," and then Lacan turned Jung and 
Neumann on their heads but continued to use the term "castration" in 
the sense that they had given it.)
     But what is the value of that term?  If one has to plow through
volumes of Freud, Melanie Klein, Jung, Neumann, and Lacan to reach an
understanding of what Lacan is saying, one begins to suspect (at least,
I do, despite finding merit in Lacan's writing) that something has gone
amuck.
     Ashraf Youssef says, "In science, jargon is a necessary evil that
should be kept to a minimum."  He further reports, "When a field of science
is young, there tends to be an explosion of jargon, and when the dust 
settles, a few people sit down and write papers or books which tend to
bring the language under control."
     After having spent the past twenty-five to thirty years struggling
with literary theory and the accompanying new terminology, I find myself
hoping very strongly for someone to bring the language under control.  The
explosion of jargon has, I think, been useful.  It has gotten us to think
about literature (and film) in a new and, one hopes, creative way.  But it
seems also to have distanced us from what, for me at least, is an important
concern--an awareness of the varying forms that human imagination has
taken at different times and in different cultures.