(6:40 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Against Theory

I have often wondered, when I hear people complain about "theory" and its "uselessness" and its corruption of the university, what exactly they think the university should be doing, if anything. This quote from Fredric Jameson's essay "Transformations of the Image" in The Cultural Turn seems to be a good assessment of the true goal of the "anti-theory" crowd. In it, he is discussing a theorist who has to pretend to be anti-theory in order to be cool and trendy:

Here the word theory tacitly encompasses everything from radicalism to philosophical speculation, from Marxism to poststructuralism, from literary theory to 'Critical Theory', from sociology to philosophies of history: everything, in short, which today prevents the university work of the humanities from deteriorating into a sandbox operation devoted to harmless and decorative eternal values and formalisms.... (117)

I guess it all depends on what you mean by "useless." If you think the function of the university is to offer high praise of the dominant culture and call that serious intellectual inquiry, then by all means get rid of theory. If you think the function of the university is to help people to see possibilities beyond their preconceived ideas or to "think," then maybe theory has a place -- even if the language is sometimes "turgid" or some other word that critics use and whose meaning they probably don't even know. With that in mind, it's funny that conservatives denounce "liberal" approaches to education as focussed on nothing but building up self-esteem, when in fact that's exactly what they envision as the purpose of the university.

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