Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are my long days, to the point where I feel too wiped to think or write anything coherent when I get home in the evenings — which is why I’ve posted fluff the last couple days. Still, I know it’s important for me to stay in the routine of writing for the dissertation every day, even if it’s for only 20 minutes or half an hour. But knowing don’t make the writing any easier.
Anyway, the “Rethinking Economy” seminar is shaping up to be kinda fun. It looks like there are about 10 people total, so nice and small, and lots of smart folks. The professor is an economic geographer who I’m hoping to ask to be on my committee, and it’s interesting because the seminar is situated in the geography department but she’s their only economic person, so there are a good number of geographers in the class, folks whose academic experience seems to be not only outside what my English-department credentials understand as the contemporary discourse of the humanities (I saw this when taking courses in the Classics department, too) but some folks whose experience seems to be pretty much outside any discourse of the humanities. In short, people with perspectives very different from my own. Which makes for a pretty dang cool seminar.
I think one thing that might help me is that the professor is approaching the discourses of economics and globalization from a perspective very much informed by poststructuralist theory, with which I’ve got a little bit of familiarity. And the instant I type that p-word, I figure there’s a good fifty percent chance you, dear reader, will lose interest. Which I find frustrating. I’ve written a little bit both here and elsewhere, about that abstracted discourse people — in hostility or, more rarely these days, pleasure — call “theory” of which that p-word is a specie. I know the reactions: “It’s nonsense.” “Self-indulgent and obfuscatory academic navel-gazing.” “Fancy words covering up a dearth of ideas.” “Hyperbolic equivocation.” And my favorite: “It’s all bullshit.” I love the arrogance of that last reaction: it reminds me of the occasional student in my writing course who suggests that no text that requires more than minimal effort to read could possibly be worth understanding. So I’ll ask, dear reader: do you hate Theory?
If you hate it: what is this Theory we’re talking about, and how does it differ from “philosophy”? And if you don’t; if you like it: what is this Theory we’re talking about, and how does it differ from “shooting the breeze”? In either case, in its differences from shooting the breeze or philosophy, would you consider Plato’s Phaedrus — certainly the finest live-wire combination of philosophy and shooting the breeze I know of — to be an instance of Theory / Theory-building?
Before I go any further, I figure I better promise you I’m not that vat-boy in the black turtleneck with tiny black-rimmed spectacles smoking Djarums. In fact, I really flippin hate that guy, especially when he starts to quote Nietzsche in his honk-honk voice. But I have learned his language, and as you’ve probably guessed, I think it’s not all bullshit, and I get impatient with folks who proclaim it to be so, because their implicit argument is, “Everybody except me is a sucker for struggling with these difficult texts, because — despite the fact that I’ve only read the tiniest fraction — my gut-level intuitive bullshit detectors tell me that I shouldn’t frustrate myself struggling like these other suckers, and so there’s nothing in these texts worth struggling for, and furthermore, I can extend that line of reasoning to all the discourse I choose to name as Theory, Hegel to Heidegger, Marx to Marcuse, Aristotle to Althusser.” For me, that kind of solipsistic focus simply doesn’t hold water.
On the other hand — if you’ll pardon the Roland Barthes moment — I also get quickly impatient with the approach of academics who think using a fancy foreign word like bricolage will disguise the fact that they’re trying to throw together a hodgepodge of whatever theoretical positions seem to suite them without attempting any sort of sophisticated argumentative rigor. I certainly see a little of that in some of the readings we’re looking forward to in this seminar, and I see a lot of it in the disciplinary discourse of composition. I mean, composition has historically had a tendence to sneer at traditions and take what it can use and try to apply it. We hijack who we like. Consider, as one example, composition’s valorization of the imperial Roman rhetorician Quintilian, and the ways in which we uncritically accept his theories without a moment’s critical reflection on his situation in relation to imperial power and without a smidgen of understanding regarding his historical fixity within the Roman empire, and without even consulting the massive secondary literature surrounding him in the disciplinary discourse of classics scholars. It’s embarassing. So I guess I have as hard a time with those who title themselves bricoleurs as I do with the know-nothing theory-haters.
Which makes me a little anxious about my own methods, because I’m trying to cobble together this theoretical understanding of the way composition talks about class from all these different sources and perspectives, and I’m worried I’m doing the same four-legs-in-the-air rut in other peoples’ theory that I accuse comp of doing. I suppose what that means is that I’m going to have to do some serious accounting in my methods section as to why I chose the sources I did.
You lost me on Roland Barthes. But prior to that, I was chomp chomp restraining on commenting.
If you’re polling: I don’t hate theory but I don’t anticipate it heartily, that’s for sure. I’m more interested in mastering the texts and mastering the criticism than I am in original scholarship. If I have a different idea, fine. If not, fine.
But I’m sure all your other fine readers will provide some insight on your pedagogical questions. 🙂 🙂
PS I think you should revisit your statement that you get a lot of “it’s bullshit” remarks. I think that may be you r point.
Beg to differ Michelle; seems Mike’s ire is as roused by anti-intellectuals as by pseudo-intellectuals.
While I was on vacation, I visited a friend of my partner’s who was a physicist at Bell Labs during its glory days, and who still consults for technology firms in his retirement. He’d just read Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense, and, thus enlightened, declared all philosophy to be worthless. It may be rude to contentiously dispute a point with one’s host, but I’d brought two bottles of good wine, so I figured I had a pass on that point of etiquette. A single data point in favor of the proposition that substantial accomplishment in one field is no proof against anti-intellectual philisitinism towards others.
Whoops—hit ‘Post’ instead of ‘Preview.’ That should in ‘in others,’ not ‘towards others’ above.
I think I may have to quit blogging these days. I am always so excited, Mike, when you write about something I think I can relate to, that I just simply want to respond, but I can’t seem to post anything coherent!
PS, sorry Mike if that previous PS seemed offensive. I did not mean to it to be.
Excellent post.
I actually used to be one of those whose gut-level instincts told me that theory was just a bunch of BS. It wasn’t until I read a bit more that I came across an argument in one text (I’ll avoid name-dropping for now, because that’s almost always a drag) that people generally approach the subject that way because of its difficulty.
Everything in theory is so intertextual that, at first, it’s just overwhelming at first. The strange thing is that people are so ready to dismiss it because of that, and because of the level of abstraction that theory works on.
Take a subject like Nuclear Physics or Rocket Science or whatever, which is just as unapproachable at the beginning, and people say that one just has to take the time and eventually everything will be made clear.
I wonder what it is about theory that makes people just so damn hostile that they’d be willing to give it the same benefit of the doubt. I suspect that your point about the black turtleneck guy might be one of the reasons.
Michelle, no worries about “offensive” — but I might ask you re “mastering the criticism” and your fondness for Cleanth Brooks: what assumptions about texts is Brooks basing his criticism upon? I mean, New Criticism is a method and a theory about texts that says, for starters, the text stands on its own in the world and is the only thing the critic needs to consider — and that, in such a fashion, the critic’s considerations can thereby be ‘pure’, as it were. As you might guess, I don’t buy the “my position is completely neutral and apolitical” position. (Neither does Virginia Woolf in AROOO; you might get a kick out of what Toril Moi has to say about her in “Sexual Textual Politics”.) And Curtiss is right: I think the stuff’s worth thinking about, which is why I was psyched to see you responding.
Curtiss — I’ve never understood the “this discipline is better than that discipline” tone to Sokal’s arguments, or that underpins the hostility evident in so many sciences folks’ attitudes towards the humanities. It shows up with some frequency over at IA.
Which, Rob, is why I was glad to see your comment about nuclear physics and such, and I wonder if — in addition to the difficulty factor and the arrogant dorkiness of some people who sublimate their insecurity and lack of social graces into becoming “experts” on one theorist or another — it’s also the instrumentality effect or technology bigotry.
But I look at this and look at my previous posts where I talk about the same thing and realize that it’s just something I can’t let alone, because I can’t figure out why it’s such a vexed topic. So I’m sure I’ll be back worrying at this old bone three or four months from now. (Maybe I’ll revisit what cranky old Mr. Fish has to say about the topic, or check out Mr. Mitchell and the Critical Inquiry crew. Well, wait — there’s that dissertation thing. So maybe not.)