Resistance to Theory: Notes From the Underground

Abstract

While in the West theory was celebrating its triumph throughout the late 1960s and in 1970s, in Soviet Russia the 1970s were already seeing theory fatigue, or even, as I will try to demonstrate, an active resistance to theory. The political context should not be missed here. Literary theory, not just as a field, but as a university discipline based on textbooks and requiring the rituals of examinations, was first institutionalised precisely in Soviet Russia, beginning in the decade between the mid-1930s and the mid-1940s. Later, however, in the mid-1970s, Russian Formalism was canonised by and amongst those seeking to eschew Marxism. It is against this background that I here discuss some examples of resistance by Soviet non-Marxist thinkers to Russian Formalism and Soviet Structuralism, despite their significance for those dissenting from official dogma. Ultimately, the question is why and how is non-Marxist theory resisted by non-Marxists in a totalitarian society, and what larger lessons for the status of theory today are bound to emerge from this.