Paper by Patricia Cox Miller

Theory/Stuff Divide
Patricia Cox Miller, Department of Religion, Syracuse University

One of my first thoughts when pondering the problematic before us, the "theory-stuff" divide, is that what we study is either all theory, or it's all stuff, but it is not both. That is, my inclination was to reject the divide as a false dichotomy. Nonetheless, I confess that I was somewhat surprised to be asked to join the "theory" panel, since I am an historian, and history--in the popular and perhaps even in the academic imagination--is surely composed of the stuffiest of stuff. So despite my initial inclination to reject the theory-stuff binarism, I wondered whether I was on the wrong panel. But just in case I am on the right panel, I will be speaking today as an historian, and on behalf of theory.

Let me begin with a story from a recently published book on grammar. A panda walks into a bar, orders a sandwich, eats it, and then pulls out a gun, fires two shots in the air, and turns to leave. The bartender, understandably confused, asks "Why"? The panda shrugs, tosses him a badly punctuated wildlife manual, and says "Here, read this; I'm a panda." "Panda," ran the entry: "large black and white mammal native to China; eats, shoots and leaves." (Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation , 2004)

Aside from being a cautionary tale about misplaced commas, this story raises a serious issue about discourse, and especially about historical discourse: what is a fact? The answer to this question will lead one either to affirm the theory/stuff divide by positing that facts are the building blocks for reconstructing "what really happened." They are the really real stuff, the historian's stock in trade. Or the answer to this question, "what is a fact," will lead one to deny the theory/stuff divide by distinguishing between events and facts. As Hayden White has argued, "events happen, whereas facts are constituted by linguistic description" ( Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect , 18). Facts are not found; they are made.

From this perspective, then, if even facts are constructs, history is theory, all the way down. Let me broaden the purview for a moment before returning to history. In a remarkable book entitled Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric , Daniel Tiffany has analyzed the intrinsic role of pictures in shaping Western knowledge of material substance (2-3). "Corporeality, and material substance itself" are "mediums that are inescapably informed by the pictures that we compose of them" (9). Focusing in part on the rise of atomic physics-natural philosophy-and microbiology in the 17th century, Tiffany argues against our modern habit of equating materialism with realism (2). The realism of modern physics, he says, relies on "a framework of vivid analogies and tropes" (3); thus "the foundation of material substance is intelligible to us, and therefore appears to be real, only if we credit the imaginary pictures we have composed of it" (3). That is, the only intuitive knowledge that we can possess of the inscrutable reality of material existence comes in the form of insubstantial pictures, or what Ian Hacking calls "the persistence of the image" in philosophical materialism (Tiffany, 4). Images, all the way down.

If one adopts the view that Western thinking about even the material realm is thus inherently figurative, then the position that history--arguably a field that situates itself in the material realm--is figurally real does not seem so strange. As E.H. Gombrich argued in his studies of Western pictorial realism, "historical discourse is less a matching of an image or a model with some extrinsic reality than a making of a verbal image, a discursive 'thing' that interferes with our perception of its supposed referent even while fixing our attention on and illuminating it" (White, 6).

Tropology was the term suggested by Hayden White to describe the relation between history and verbal image. In his well known book Metahistory , White analyzed the deep structure of the historical imagination in the works of 19th-century historians, arguing that narrative histories are emplotted as romance, comedy, tragedy, or satire. To complicate matters even further, he postulated four main modes of historical consciousness-metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony. He also identified four possible modes of argument--Formism, Organicism, Mechanism, and Contextualism--and these all have ideological implications--Anarchism, Conservatism, Radicalism, and Liberalism. This is really theory all the way down! In a collection of essays subsequent to the publication of Metahistory , White wrote the following, more intelligible statement of his position: "to emplot real events as a story of a specific kind is to trope those events. This is because stories are not lived; there is no such thing as a real story. Stories are told or written, not found. And as for the notion of a true story, this is virtually a contradiction in terms. All stories are fictions. Which means, of course, that they can be true only in a metaphorical sense, and in the sense in which a figure of speech can be true. Is this true enough?" ( Figural Realism , 9).

White's and others' articulations of history in terms of figural realism have been immensely liberating for my own work as an historian, and since I was initially asked to include in my remarks some indication of how the "theory-stuff divide" has affected me as a scholar, I will conclude with a few observations. First, getting rid of this divide by viewing historical texts as figurally real freed me to approach ancient texts as literature, and not as a trove of facts to be mined for social, political, and institutional data. My reading of ancient texts is guided by what I consider, with White, to be the truth of their figures of speech, which may or may not accord with their authors' intentions. This is what I call, following New Historicists Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, "the method of the Luminous Detail," since the figures I concentrate on are usually moments when a text confounds itself in "aporiae, those tears where energies, desires, and repressions flow out into the world" ( Practicing New Historicism , 15, 109).

Second, being liberated from the iron grip of "facts" enabled me to broaden my vision in terms of what kinds of reading were relevant to the interpretation of ancient texts, and so I began to read widely in contemporary literary criticism. If you were to ask my colleagues in the study of religion in late antiquity what stands out about my work, they would probably say--in fact, they have said, in book blurbs--"she knows postmodern theory." Well, yes--but those theories, so to speak, are no more "theoretical" than historical writing, although their expression is often at a level of greater abstraction than that of history. Also, it is not the case that I take a modern theory and slap it down on a defenseless ancient text. Rather, I write in conversation with other discourses on other kinds of texts, and this has led me to some surprising discoveries, for example, that Roland Barthes' observations on the erotics of textuality were already at work in Origen of Alexandria's Commentary on the Song of Songs , or that Derridean theories of textual semiosis had already been formulated, although with a different vocabulary and mythos, in certain Valentinian Gnostic texts. As J. Hillis Miller has argued, "it can always be demonstrated that the apparent novelty of any new development in criticism is the renewal of an insight that has been found and lost and found again repeatedly through all the centuries of study since the first Homeric and biblical commentaries. The novelty of any new criticism is not in its linguistic insights or techniques but rather in the accident of its expression"("Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II," Georgia Review 30 [1976]:332).

Finally, we panelists were asked to discuss the practical, job-market consequences of getting a degree in our department, which is known for theory. But before I can possibly discuss this, I have to ask, What is meant by theory? Is it the ability to achieve a degree of abstract or generalized expression based on being immersed in the stuff of one's own discipline? I would suggest that it is. In this understanding, "stuff" does not designate an area of study; it designates the contents of one's expertise, whether that be philosophy of religion, theology, or ancient Christianity. If that's the case, then theory also does not designate an area of study, but rather the ability to stand apart from one's own stuff and say something interesting about it, interesting in the sense that it can cross disciplinary boundaries and influence the way someone else views his or her own expertise. Despite the fact that I have spoken from the perspective of my own discipline on behalf of theory, I want to drop that term as a defining characteristic of the department. It is expertise that will get you a job, expertise understood as both depth of learning and breadth of vision.