Last week, the Department of Sociology, the Department of English, the Center for the Study of American Democracy (CSAD) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Kenyon hosted cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander and postcritical literary theorist Rita Felski for three events over two days. From a conversation on the evening of March 18 and individual talks the following day, Alexander and Felski engaged the campus in dialogues about the purpose of theory, methodologies besides critique and how to engage with the world as a human being.
Hosted in Archon Auditorium, Wednesday’s conversation was titled “Can Theory Save the World? A conversation with Rita Felski and Jeffrey Alexander on Criticism, Culture, and Public Life” and was moderated by NEH Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of Sociology Celso Villegas. Villegas was the main organizer behind this collaboration and began the talk. “In today’s public debates, theory has come to represent a kind of academic way of thinking that’s tendentious, impractical, political and condescending. … And higher education suffers, I think, from the politics of this interference and division,” Villegas set the scene. “Is there another way to approach democratic life in a cynical age instead of endless critique, and can literary studies and sociology give us the answers?”
Over the next hour and a half, Alexander and Felski discussed a wide range of topics, including what counts as theory and how the audience, as educated people in society, ought to approach those with whom they disagree; with faith rather than suspicion.
Alexander, in particular, sought to break down the distinction between academic thought and everyday common sense. He stressed that everyone is a theorist and that understanding society takes the same technique as understanding texts. “We’re in a gigantic drama of Trumpism. If you want to understand the society we’re in now, you need to understand what a plot is, what a drama is. You have to understand protagonists and antagonists. You need to understand triumph and tragedy,” Alexander explained. “In a way, I think living in society isn’t epistemologically different from reading a novel.”
Felski echoed similar sentiments. In asking her audience to think about the limits of critically approaching a text and the possible benefits of a more affirming method, she extended the lesson to real, human interactions. “On the one hand, there are these large-scale patterns. There is racial inequality, there is a massive and increasing class inequality. … So yes, that’s true, and that needs to be acknowledged,” Felski elaborated. “But nevertheless, there’s also the sense in which we are individuals, right? We can’t let the humanity of another person be reduced to their status as just another example of whiteness or maleness or homophobia.” Felski advised against a diagnostic approach that labels people as racist or homophobic.
Felski and Alexander each gave their own talks the following day. Felski presented “Selective Affinities: Literature and New Critical Theory” at 11:10 a.m. in the Community Foundation Theater. The talk, which shared a title with her upcoming book, further addressed the merits of developing more robust methods for affirmation rather than critique. Alexander presented “Theory of Trump” in the same room at 4:10 p.m. He gave an analysis of Donald Trump’s success using his theories of backlash and the civil sphere that uses a binary democratic code to demarcate who does and does not count as a legitimate member of civil society.
Felski and Alexander were asked how one could use theory to try and save the world. They discussed the importance of academic theories in tandem with the importance of how to be a good human being. “We both are very interested in this distinction that the French philosopher Paul Ricœur makes between hermeneutics of suspicion and hermeneutics of faith — meaning that instead of trying to find out what’s behind a text, you are willing to enter into it with faith, to see what it has to offer, to understand it sympathetically,” Alexander said in Wednesday’s conversation.
Alexander and Felski did impart life advice, though. They called on listeners to lean on the humanities when forming their theoretical views of the world. According to Villegas, they challenged the concept of the objective observer and the assumption that “smart people stand back and they look behind things, and they don’t take things at face value.”
“[It’s] not a bad thing to be able to do, but it can’t be exhaustive of the kinds of stuff that we ask you to take on, particularly as people going through the liberal arts and coming out there maybe to be good people, broadly defined, and good citizens, at the very least,” he continued. “I don’t think we ever figured out how to save the world, but at least I think they provided some sense of what we might do differently.”