The Ideas Letter

It’s impossible to overstate how intense the rage once was for and against “Theory” in literature departments during the last quarter of the twentieth century. A friend of mine, a PhD student in the comp lit faculty at Columbia University in the 1990s, recently remarked that the department almost went into receivership, battered and bruised by the ferocious schism between the Theory heads and those who preferred to teach literature. Since so much of this business was made in France in the 1960s, we asked the critic and editor Lola Seaton to examine two new books—sorry, “texts”!—that personalize as well as historicize that French-fried moment. Were the anxious years when Theory held court worth all the trouble?

On the subject of theory, not many people under the age of 50 will remember the intellectual firepower of the journal Telos. Founded in that heady year of 1968 as a journal of critical theory and culture in the leftist outpost of SUNY Buffalo (a history of radical academia in Buffalo awaits its scribe), the publication first endeavored to give the New Left a more proper philosophical foundation. Then came its long march toward the political right, culminating in the journal’s quixotic positions of recent years. Geoff Shullenberger, a lapidary writer with the forthcoming book Strange New Thoughts: The Origins and Rise of the Tech Right, looks at the longue durée of Telos and its ideological flips and turns through the present day. These appear to be the publication’s actual telos.

Anna Greenspan and Laura Tripaldi are based in what some might say is Buffalo’s obverse: Shanghai. NYU-Shanghai to be precise. For The Ideas Letter, the scholars challenge the shopworn story that progress is defined by making machines more effective at doing human work.