David B. Downing. Just Theory. (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2019) 459 pp., $49.99.
On December 28, 2020, the New York Times published an article entitled “How the Pandemic is Imperiling a Working-Class College” about Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Reporter Matt Richtel noted that COVID-19’s significant economic impact meant administrators at IUP and other state universities within the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education would have to make drastic budget cuts. At IUP, this meant program elimination and faculty retrenchment as the university’s leadership used the pandemic to revision the campus as one emphasizing STEM. “IUP’s areas of focus will be science, math, computer science, pre-engineering and engineering; allied health disciplines; behavioral health; business; and…a strong general education core,” the announcement declares (“IUP Announces”). “The IUP of the future will continue to prepare students for life and a successful career, not just a job…”.
Historically, IUP was a normal school and maintained its teaching emphasis while still insisting faculty engage in rigorous research. The decision to eliminate some programs entirely and to combine non-STEM divisions under one umbrella such as a “Creative Arts, Humanities, and Design” college flies in the face of that history. But in hindsight it shouldn’t be unexpected. After all, as Richtel adds, “The pandemic is only the latest assault after more than a decade of financial hits on these schools.” Richtel explains how the combination of “Republican-led pressure to reduce state spending” combined with the “millions spent…on fancy amenities” by the university shifted the tuition burden onto students, which discouraged them from enrolling. This declining enrollment in turn became part of the leadership’s justification to wipe out programs and faculty positions. Significantly, IUP’s radical pivot to a STEM focus indicates its embrace of what Just Theory-author David Downing calls neoliberalism’s “economic rationality” (xviii), reflected not only in its draconian cut of 128 faculty positions, but in its rhetoric when it states the campus will offer students a career while it also meets “workforce demand” (“IUP Announces”).
This introductory focus on IUP is not incidental and not merely because a university garnered the Times’s attention. Downing retired from IUP in 2019 and this book is an elaboration of a graduate course he taught there entitled “The History and Theory of Criticism.” I should know, as I was a graduate student who took this course; in the interest of full disclosure, he served as my dissertation director and I am one of the many colleagues he mentions in the book’s acknowledgements. But I was his student many years ago now, and even as I rail against IUP’s decision to devalue the programs I held dear, I recognize the prescience of “The History and Theory of Criticism,” which Downing now offers everyone else by virtue of this book.
Just Theory connects the dots between such seemingly disparate subjects as literary theory, Western philosophy, and economics. It represents Downing’s effort to show the evolution of the Western philosophical tradition into the discipline of English as we know it today. In order to collapse thousands of years into manageable cohesion, Downing focuses on two periods. He calls these epochs “cultural turns” because of the production of theoretical texts that emerged within the geopolitical economy of those ages (xiii). Downing identifies Cultural Turn 1 as occurring from roughly the fifth to the fourth centuries BCE with the then-nascent field of philosophy. From that time, “A new vocabulary of reason, logic, and dialectic came into being as a powerful cultural narrative” (xiii). Cultural Turn 2, he then asserts, occurs some two thousand years later and covers the roughly 100 years that began with the Romantic Revolution and lasted to the Paris Commune. Cultural Turn 2’s significance is that its discourse continues to inform the modern era’s “literary, social, cultural, political, and geophysical landscapes” (xviii).
Downing elaborates upon each cultural turn, providing close readings, context, and impact. For example, in “Cultural Turn 1. Inventing Western Metaphyics,” Downing notes the various ways Plato, particularly the “Allegory of the Cave,” remains core to modern-day thinking. The “Allegory” established the dialectic, or that “dualism that plays out in the formation of modern disciplines of knowledge” (46-47). Dualisms appear so expressly in our Western social, political, and economic discourse (man-woman, love it-leave it, have-have not) that they appear to be unquestionable formulations. A singular idea I took from Downing’s course, which he reiterates in Just Theory, is the reminder that we are so “sick with Western metaphysics” we automatically see complex issues in either-or binaries. While Downing and others (he cites, e.g., David Harvey) see the process of working through dialectical tensions as generally positive, Downing argues that over time “what we most frequently got was a less radical, more convenient way of abstracting theory from its sociohistorical contexts,” which prevents us from fully engaging in discourse with others who hold different views (4-5). A pertinent idea from Part I, then, is his call for us to “break down the founding terms of this formalist discourse so we can begin to trace out the impact they have had on our own lives” (75). We need to do so in order to move towards a universalism and social justice that seems nigh impossible in our current, politically bifurcated moment.
Besides the dialectic, Downing explains the signficance of the copula, the movement from orality to literacy, and other key features of Cultural Turn 1. Then, in Cultural Turn 2, Downing acknowledges Cultural Turn 1’s lasting influence with Part 2’s subtitle “Rewriting Western Metaphysics for a Revolutionary Age.” Downing argues that Cultural Turn 2 is notable as a transitional moment in the capitalist world system (143). He elaborates on the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy, the rise of the “free market” in England, and the social change brought about as a result of these forces. Through providing close readings of texts like Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Downing delves into the ideological struggles between radical Romanticism and Romantic idealism, arguments notable for their “concerns for alternative geopolitical economies, for mutuality, receiprocity, and social justice rather than endless competition” (xvi). While Downing says the calls for these changes “may now seem naïve or merely wishful thinking, …they were occurring at the very historical juncture when the fossil fuel age began” (xvi).
The echoes of Cultural Turn 2 thus are familiar to us today as we witness greater calls for social justice stemming from inequities brought to light through the COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportionate impact on communities of color, the activism that occurred in response to the death of George Floyd, and myriad other awareness-generating movements like #MeToo. Unlike the beginning of Cultural Turn 2, however, we are not seeing the beginning of the fossil fuel age, but its decline. Downing argues that it’s important for us to recognize the historical narratives that have brought us to the brink of these various crises—for example, the narrative that says we have “endless” resources to extract—and interrogate them. The “disastrous logic” of these narratives has not just political but economic and environmental consequences as “[They] are vestiges of a reductive version of Western metaphysics called neoliberalism that have converted all communal and social relations to competitive enterprises measured exclusively by the economic metrics of the market” (352). Evidence of this reduction appears in the narrative that IUP’s leadership tells to justify their restructuring plans for a public institution that will meet the employment demands of private industry.
Part of IUP’s narrative is that it will prepare students for a career, not “just” a job, signaling that any non-career is “mere” and inadequate somehow. Similarly, Downing intentionally uses the reductive sense of the word “just” in the book’s title. He does so to make an ironic rhetorical nod towards those who conceive of theory as only a set of ideas apart from any larger context, as if, like a student’s job, they have no other pragmatic purpose. Through his arguments, Downing demonstrates theory’s emergence from social, political, and historical forces, and in turn how the application of theory can influence those same forces.
But perhaps more importantly, Downing intends just to serve as an adjective for fairness and equity, “the good kind of theory that contributes to making the world a more just place”; apart from that statement, though, Downing admits he doesn’t know what “just theory” truly is (xix-xx). This is rather problematic and potentially offputting to readers who might think, “Well, what’s the point, then?” Yet Downing attempts to articulate a concept of “just theory” in his discussion in “Cultural Turn 3,” which is our current historical moment, ripe as it is with both peril and promise. He states, “’Just theory’ is, therefore, not a single theory or method: it names a loose assemblage of related theories, methods, and stories with different strategic aims. . . [that] share commitments to social justice through the transformation of unjust hierarchies” (374). Thus, it’s incumbent upon us to question, challenge, change and engage, to create something new and better based on the lessons of history. Just us.
Tracy Lassiter
University of New Mexico-Gallup
Gallup, NM, USA
Works Cited
“IUP Announces Steps Toward Creating IUP for the Future.” Indiana University of Pennsylvania. 14 Oct. 2020. www.iup.edu/news-item.aspx?id=289412&blogid=6121. Accessed 28 Jan. 2021.
Richtel, Matt. “How the Pandemic is Imperiling a Working-Class College.” The New York Times. 28 Dec. 2020.
