Why do Theory?

In other words, who cares?

To most people in the Anglophone world, the answer seems obvious: you shouldn’t! Theory is intimidating, to say the least. It’s also pretentious, famously inaccessibly, often irrelevant, and frequently presented in opposition to the empirical: the ‘real.’ You can study finance and learn how the world works… or study art and learn a bunch of bullshit poetry to ‘think’ you understand it. The choice is framed as such: whimsical continental fruit baskets or hard-headed analytical tactics? I’ve always found it fruitful comparing theory to area studies. The latter grounds itself sufficiently in a location, providing a set of politics, belief, cultural practices, and symbolic articulation. Moreover, as a philologist, I see area studies based on a certain linguistic departure which offers a basic sense of text: studying society all comes down to what people are saying, what they say about themselves, what others have said in the past, and how one uses language in time to express oneself.

In contrast to this seemingly well-grounded starting point in reality, theory appears highly convoluted, existing in an insulted environment of safe removal far, far away. Such is Anglophone empiricism’s recurring dismissive counter: theory all-too-often exists in and of itself. Highly prolific writers produce dozens of works, which lies outside the capacity of the historical philologist dependent on a more time-consuming methodology. Herein lies another central critique: the assumption that while traditional disciplines (history, linguistics, sociology, philosophy, even literary theory) are built upon agreed-upon, carefully refined senses of methodology, the theorist is bound by no such constraints. This is partially mistaken; the production of theory is an intimately personal activity that eschews the academic tendency to follow well-disciplined forms of self-expression.

That’s probably why academics despise it, after all—particularly UK and US professors who bear a different kind of self-righteousness! But the issue here is that empiricism is also insular to the point of bearing ultimate pretensions to reality and thereby to Ultimate Truth of a theological significance. This isn’t simply thought like David Hume’s which denied the existence of the self, but in the uncompromisingly mechanical, inhuman logics of neoliberal government and business ontology that work over us completely.

The cardinal sin here, as it is for empiricists, is the pretension to reality, to non-ideological presence. This sort of shallow postmodernist, faux-Foucaultist and pedestrian-Deleuzian outlook of always plural, like the multiplicity and difference it so fiercely promotes. Theory of this sort is, ironically, always particular. It finds itself unable to accept the existence of any universal, opposed vehemently to any sort of systemic thinking (or even shared source material) that it views instinctively as oppressive, divisive, and fascist.

‘We do not need a shared point of understanding to access two disparate areas/cultures/literary traditions.’

I’ve now heard this perspective several times in academia, not merely amongst students but sadly amongst professors too. The ‘post-modern’ suspicion of grand-narratives and interdisciplinary ambitions (ironic, for obvious reasons of its own universal claim) is everywhere threatening. View everything on its own terms, it invites us! Have they not considered the oppressive nature of their injunction—the audacity that things dare speak for themselves as you can understand? What’s more, that you might accept, love, and share? So too is the opposite, the antagonistic ‘clash of civilizations’ theory another great menace that lurks at every turn. If postmodern essentialism is a belief in the veiled esoterism of essential attributes that can only be accessed by a select few interpreters whose practice foreclose their conclusions, the clash is a fatal clap-back: a reassertion of unavoidable difference that can only be resolved by strength of arms.

The need for theory tragically created by its misuse emerges amongst hazardous problematics of comparison necessary both for political projects and for the understanding of real abstractions. Take a notable example from the work of literary scholar Rey Chow. Developing Arendt’s skepticism for supposed universal sameness, Chow argues that Foucault’s notion of taxonomic literature is outdated, ignoring both inevitable comparative violence and the reeling infinity of negotiated meaning. It is here that Chow encounters Auerbach’s problem of national philology. If literature is located within both the dilated boundaries of the no-longer and the not-yet, then a literary product must be judged as irreducible—partly by virtue of its literariness, partly by its momentary origins. But Chow maintains that reflexive fidelity will somehow birth discursive theory. A universal like comparative literature cannot declare its agenda as seeking cosmopolitan discourse (that was the cardinal sin of the past) but must remain rooted in its own cultural framework and yet! she declares,

“in their very cultural specificities, these studies nonetheless come across as transcultural, with implications that resonate well beyond their individual locations.”[1]

Chow has encountered a tautology when she employs the individual as a yardstick for the group and the group a measure of the individual. She has explicitly claimed that a capacity for critical distance resides wholly in the irreducible particularity of appreciation. It is not for nothing that Jameson defined this sort of theory’s extreme personability that comes from picking and choosing as eminently consumerist! Undoubtedly, Chow continues to treat reason as authoritative, the self as essential, based purely on its capacity for self-efficacy—yet assumes that this necessary isolation also creates necessarily shared comparative experience.

Such is the ever-growing need for proper theoretical engagement and development. Area studies and traditional social sciences also exhibit this need alongside criticism, partly because the objective of such study is more bound by traditional academic directives of clarity, transparency, meaning-focused interpretation, and a removal from ‘practice.’ Here, actually, is another mistake too. The academic thinks that, by taking a distanced stance from the object of study in order to write comprehensively about it, he does it more justice. Decriers of academic method, rogue scholars, activists, and pulp-writers alike, instead attempt to get closer to the objects to study their practice. Both claim a sense of rightness and invincibility, both think themselves best able to discern the latent meanings and the visible movements of their objects. But they are both mistaken. Undertaking study theory and practice each necessarily locates us as outsiders and observers; there is no first positionality of interpretation. Theory’s greatest sin lies not in its rule-breaking potential but in its exclusive posturing. Theory is often inaccessible because it is interdisciplinary par excellence, because it is so personal.

Sadly, this all gives rise to tremendous networks of byzantine complexity woven carefully into cults of personality. The other significant challenge of theory is its intensely self-referentiality, making any foray into its mass a necessary commitment endless reading. You’d like to cite Baudrillard? And you’re going to cite Simulacra and Simulation? Well, you can’t understand Baudrillard without reading his earlier sociological work, of course! At the very least, you ought to read The Consumer Society, The Mirror of Production, The System of Objects, and Symbolic Exchange and Death (some of which I have not yet finished). And don’t forget his later post-academic work as a public intellectual…
…have you read his debate with Foucault?
…are you aware of his influence on popular-culture, like the Matrix franchise, which he himself disavowed?
…have you engaged his main critics? Mark Poster? Douglas Kellner—Christopher Norris?

No wonder people shy away from theory.

So I’m going to make a case for it. I’ll explain why I advocate writing and thinking theoretically: what this details, why I think it matters, and how I relate it to my larger pedagogical philosophy. This is, in a sense, self-reflexive: I’m explaining what I do and why I do it. But I only do what I do because I think others should do it as well. This is a social argument on the self, just as much as my teaching—an expressive action of mine—is always aimed outwards at others as well as brought home to bear again upon myself.

If theory is always meant to go somewhere, let us go then. And let us go together. Let us fight, all of us, for a new world—the world as we see and understand it—an ever-expansive image of the world that we construct together through always-critical posture, a continuous rethinking of our own thought. Let us seek intellectual emancipation and overturn the hierarchy of intelligence.

“I must teach you that I have nothing to teach you.”

[1] Rey Chow, “The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective” in ELH, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Summer 2004), p. 301