The significance of theories

Practically every theory which aimed at a complete, all-embracing explanation was framed by a speaker of the German language.  Apart from the endless succession of deep and unreadable philosophers - Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and so on - there is a parallel constellation of equally eminent thinkers, each of whom chose to mine some more specialised vein of existence.  In Freud's case it was the psyche, music in Schenker's, nuclear physics in Schrödinger's, and gravity in Einstein's. Even the artists were obsessed with rigour and completeness - Goethe with his anti-Newtonian theory of light and perception, Wagner with his Gesamtkunstwerk.

This mania for order is manifest in their common language.  As well as the inflected nouns, which in themselves are hardly exceptional, there are a host of rules regarding inversion of subjects and verbs, and the placing and formation of participles.  The delight in labyrinthine sentences replete with qualifying subclauses, together with the monstrous compound words, all speak volumes about the Germanic cast of mind.

Today it is different.  The German thinkers are silent, perhaps abashed by two world wars, vaguely aware that their love of order may have lain near the root of both.  Few others essay global theories about existence.  Artists have enough problems in this post-modernist age without getting bogged down in aesthetics.  Only architects produce theories and counter-theories - probably because they get to realise so few of their designs.

This leaves the scientists.  They are certainly busy as never before.  But the impetus has changed.  Once they were engaged in a winnable battle against mysterious Mother Nature.  Then, vindication was reward enough.  No longer.  Scientists frame theories so that they can publish papers, go to conferences, win tenure.  Above all to make money.  It is hardly a coincidence that most science research is now carried out in America.

If the scientists, the standard bearers of the modern age, have proved themselves so venal, and unequal to the great task of concocting comprehensive theories, little wonder that the rest of mankind has given up completely.  Instead of fundamental explanations, all we can hope for now is significance.

And so it is that everywhere you go, the significance-mongers are at it.  Sometimes they grace themselves with grand Gallic names like semioticians or structuralists; some are analysts, some commentators, others are just pundits.  Whatever the name, their task is identical: to hunt out the rich truffle of successively more unlikely and implausible meanings in even the most footling and risible of society's detritus.

Thus we have the television critics, turning shameless soap to Shakespeare; the style-watchers who gloss every crease in the Gucci; and most insidious of all, the cynical, clever journalists.  Wittily subverting the world, they more subtly assert it.  They prefer to juggle with words rather than judge with them.  In time, theories bring forth revolutions; plucking out one of a million significances alters not a jot.

(8.2.87)

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