David -
Thank you for your intelligent response.  It got me thinking.

One way I don't like to think about "theory" is as a monolith
(realizing that "monolith" is a bit of a cliche by now.)  Even if the
effect of "theory" is to vitiate our intelligence, as you claim rather
broadly, how could we generalize this claim to apply to every
"theorist"?  Isn't the problem really that brand-name theorists have
been insitutionalized around some of the more powerful humanities
departments, and are used as combination shibboleth/ retaining wall to
keep out and confuse newcomers?  Very well then, but that is a
different claim: which aspect of "theory" do you think "disempowers the
literary intelligence", the existence of the discourse of the theorist,
or the application of the same to sophomore English majors at SUNY -
Buffalo (to pick an example at random)?

For my literate money, the months I've spent slowly reading _A Thousand
Plateaus_ have not been spent in vain.  Even if I don't know exactly
what Deleuze & Guattari are getting at at every point, I leave each
reading encounter with more (...I don't know exactly what to say...)
desire to write for myself, I suppose.  It's sort of a nightstand book
for me.  And anyone who loves the Cantos knows what I'm talking about
here: the knowledge that one has read, and the feeling that one has
learned & enjoyed, but at the same time, the impossibility of restating
what it was that was so exciting, the imprecision of memory, the
fundamentally difficult nature of vortical thinking, which exists
uneasily between music and philosophy.  And just because young readers
would be swamped by the difficulties of Pound or Deleuze or Benjamin
doesn't mean that Pound, Deleuze, or Benjamin are really guilty of
vitiating intellect.  Merely that, as you note helpfully, one should
prepare oneself, perhaps with some philosophical training (perhaps also
with some instruction in church history, perhaps with some zazen,
perhaps with anything that seems to activate the mind and prepare it
for encountering the overwhelming.)  There's a trick to withstanding
the force of a wave, but it's not to lament the push of the wind.

Maybe in an institutional way, authors like these can take on stronger
and stronger auratic power, until the length and breadth of their
author function, no matter what they themselves intended, could block
out the sun.  And as far as this happens, I agree with you that theory
could be more a curse than a blessing.  (I suspect it's neither, not
being a singular "it" at all.)  Imagine if, for some reason, Pound's
prose became suddenly and forcefully canonical: wouldn't his position
as a voice of outsider-critique be somehow compromised?  His words
would not have changed, but their social utility would have been
rechannelled, and many would talk about Pound as though he and his ilk
were designed for torment rather than instruction.  It might even be
easy to sympathize with them, if you're a sympathetic person: Pound is
hard when you don't know much, or aren't able to be interested at will.

Deleuze recommended that we read _A Thousand Plateaus_ "as you would
listen to a record".  We might say that this is a cop out,
philosophically speaking, but we also might say that his writing
occupies a genre of its own, one that can exist in between more usual
kinds of writing.  I just read a chapter of his about birdsong and
territoriality.  At the same time, I've been reading a short book by M.
Foucault about "parrhesia". a techinical term from antique Greece that
refers to something like free speech.  To prove his point, MF performs
straightforward readings of Sophoclean and Euripidean plays, and thinks
about Socrates, and Athenian democracy.  Between these two examples of
writing, I can see no immediate similarity, and nothing to justify
yoking them and innumerable other difficult, strange essays under a
single rubric.  The differences between "theories" resist their
institutionalization as "theory".

Should Pound have been as lucky as Foucault was, having an audience who
really desired his pedagogy, how drastically would this have altered
his career?  How much time would he have spent in that metal cage?  A
more interesting question is, what conditions allowed Foucault et al.
to attract appreciative audiences, first in France, and then in the US
and the UK?  What conditioned Pound's audience, on the other hand?
Suddenly, nationality seems really important to me...

This is fun.  I hope everyone's having a nice day, and is ready to be
done with February.
Merry March, (lousy Smarch weather),

Jon (Weidler - pronounced "wide - ler")

On Friday, February 28, 2003, at 04:54  AM, A. David Moody wrote:

> The likeness to Benjamin's Arcades project is intriguing, but The
> Cantos are
> organised by a quite different method. 'They say they [the details] are
> chosen at random', Pound said, 'But that's not the way it is.  It's
> music,
> musical themes that find each other out.'  Trying to get your head
> around
> that will be more useful than blowing it up with theory.
>
> Your other thread is not really separate.  My quarrel with 'Theory' as
> it
> has infected US and UK academics, especially those who profess to study
> literature, has nothing to do with its being French in origin.  The
> French
> generally have the philosophical training needed to handle it.  As
> reproduced -- note the word -- by too many UK and US academics 'Theory'
> vitiates thought and disempowers intelligence. It disempowers the
> literary
> intelligence in particular.  You can't read texts and you can't read
> your
> world when you are applying the questions and the answers 'Theory' has
> laid
> down for you.  There's also the mental fog from the theorists writing
> no
> language.   The hegemony of theory in the humanities has been a major
> betrayal and a cultural disaster, disabling clever young minds from
> engaging
> critically and constructively with what's actually going on in the
> world.
>
> To learn, by exacting and discriminating attention, what is actually
> going
> in The Cantos -- to make out the light (and the dark) in the detail
> and then
> the musical organisation -- would be a more relevant training for
> making
> sense, let us say, of the daily unfolding tragedy.   Some proper
> philosophical training would help too.
>
> David Moody