The Dangerous Irrelevance of Recent Theory‪.‬

IN HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN'S "The Emperor's New Clothes," two con artists swindle the emperor and his court into believing in the existence of magical clothes that will reveal the incompetence or the stupidity of anyone unable to appreciate their invisible workmanship. The two charlatans rely on the vanity and the insecurity of their audience, none of whom wishes to be revealed as unsophisticated or incompetent. In the story, the deceit is revealed only when a small child points out that the emperor is, in fact, not wearing any clothes, but even after the ordinary people shout their agreement with the child, the emperor and his entourage continue on, more determined than ever to maintain the fraud in which they are participating. Like the Emperor who wears no clothes, recent criticism struts proudly in the vanguard of its own parade of obsequious followers, none of them daring enough to admit that they cannot actually see the fine work that the theorists claim to have woven. In the case of poststructuralism, much originality was claimed for a methodology that, as John Ellis pointed out years ago, was merely a trite reworking of a system of thought that had been more clearly and forcefully set forth in the Enlightenment itself. "The method of doubt" pioneered by Descartes and Pascal, as Bronowski and Mazlish point out in The Western Intellectual Tradition (1960), "came to be used [in the eighteenth century] by the great antireligious French skeptics as a matter of course," and "the method of doubt has really been one of the fundamental methods of French thinking ever since." The fundamental element linking poststructuralism, New Historicism, and cultural studies has been an insistence on moral skepticism, a nonjudgmental and relativistic conception of ethics intended to undermine traditional Western values. The extreme opacity of a Lacan or a Derrida attempted not only to mask the utter triteness of their line of thinking but, by making doubt fashionable, to insinuate a pervasive cultural cynicism.