Perhaps nothing is so overdue as an intellectual correction to the excesses of critical theory’s hegemony in the humanities disciplines of the Anglo-American academy, with emphasis on American and literary studies. However, so many of the attacks - whether from the popular press or from non-humanities disciplines - are unsatisfactory screeds that puff up straw men to knock down. Brian Leiter points out this tendency in a rather good post about the blog Butterflies and Wheels:
“Butterflies and Wheels” purports to be “fighting fashionable nonsense,” and they do some of the time.
So why are they posting prominent links… to tabloid trash like this, which misstates Foucault’s views from top to bottom, and offers no rational criticism of any view he actually held, while offering up a series of fallacious arguments (ad hominems primarily–you would think Ms. Benson of B&W might notice that references to Foucault’s homosexuality do not refute his ideas).
And I say this as a Foucault skeptic! Foucault’s corpus is, to put the matter gently, a mixed bag; his reflections on matters epistemological are a muddle, yet at the same time he did more than anyone since Max Weber to fill out our picture of “the iron cage of modernity.”
The major currents in critical theory - what David Bordwell calls SLAB theory (Saussurean semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, and Barthesian textual theory) - certainly need more critique from within the humanities disciplines than they’re currently receiving. But these thinkers do provide some insight, it’s now just the matter of figuring out which parts hold up and which parts are belle-lettristic piffle. In fact, rather than dismissing critical theory tout court, we should be attacking the deadly combination of belle-lettrism and pseudo-scientificity that generates the worst aspects of theory: unfalsifiability of claims about the empirical world, scholarship that’s axiomatic rather than inductive in approach, and a tendency both to create straw men out of its target (science, bourgeois culture, et al.) and to bait and switch, alternating complex philosophical tightrope-walking around the relativism of meaning with simplistic aphorisms (there is no outside the text, all meaning is arbitrary).
However, those cheering the end of critical theory better be careful what they wish for. At least in film studies, SLAB theory is being replaced in part by thinkers, like Gilles Deleuze, who if anything are even less conducive to systematic objectification of culture as an object of study. If a poorly done philosophy-social science hybrid has been bad, the withdrawal into solipsistic metaphysics-manque will be worse.
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