The Birth of Counter Theory
9
that one seems to always come before the other. Poe’s short story does not need
Lacan, Derrida, nor Johnson to produce meaning, while Lacan, Derrida, and
Johnson do need Poe to validate their theories.12 And to establish the essential
differences between Poe’s short story and the three aforementioned essays (that
is to say, between fiction and criticism), the concepts of narrative authority and
textual intention might be good places to start; the creation of a fictional
universe and that of characters might come to mind as well. In the end, it seems
that, in spite of De Man’s affirmation, no one will ever read Poe’s short story as
a feminist essay on a deconstructive reading of a psychoanalytical interpretation.
We could of course try to read Lacan’s, Derrida’s, and Johnson’s essays as short
stories; they just wouldn’t be very entertaining.
A direct consequence of the confusion between the object of study and the
study itself is the merging of the method with the object, the theme with the
approach, and thus, political agendas have appeared as Theories, contributing to
further erase the corpus of study behind ideological priorities. The challenges to
absolute values brought forward by deconstruction, although doubtlessly
beneficial to racial and sexual minorities in times of political correctness, have
served to justify purely ideological readings, often accompanied by open, if not
unfounded, theoretical declarations. Queer Studies, for instance, have efficiently
fused an important theme of research, that of gay, lesbian, and transgendered
voices in literature, with an actual method of interpretation. The same can be
said of Area Studies, Border Studies, and Disability Studies, which are defined
according to the object of their inquiry and do not constitute a set of
interpretative principles but rather a very strict thematic orientation; if we are to
accept Queer Studies as a method of interpretation, then any text or narration
which does not exhibit at least traces of homosexual or transgendered tendencies
is automatically excluded from the corpus. Furthermore, any other theme or
narrative motif present in the text or the narration is openly ignored as
interpretation is reduced to a simple ideological revindication.13
If the confusion between Literature and criticism, as well as the merging of
the method with the object of study, have allowed for the production of vast
amounts of printed material, which in turn helped in securing tenured university
positions, they have also mined the very field in which they were used by
legitimizing polysemia and subjectivity, and openly favoring obscurity over
clarity in any type of critical inquiry. Theory has become a literary genre in
itself, indistinguishable from Literature, which, rather than providing tools for
the interpretation of literary texts, has simply taken their place.14
Counter Theory, Relative Synthesis, and Deconceptivism
We find ourselves in the difficult position of rejecting the last thirty-odd
years of so-called “Critical Theory” which, rather than provide us with methods
of textual and narrative interpretation, as Sociology or Structuralism did, has
erected a massive wall of intimidating, over-conceptualized discourse between
us and our object of study. In order to prevent further deterioration of our field
of studies, the first priority of Counter Theory is to rescue the actual corpus of