Offering Theory

John Mowitt

Description

A reading of Theory when and where it arises in the event of reading and how Theory might best be handled in the context of higher education today

Advanced study in the humanities and social sciences discloses a deep ambivalence about Theory. Structurally, of course, the professionalization of young academics is approaching extinction. There are fewer and fewer secure jobs in academia, and thus fewer and fewer students embarking upon advanced study, and, in turn, fewer and fewer programs educating these students. What is offered the remaining students is instructive. Notably, students are expected by their future colleagues to be familiar with, maybe even conversant in Theory, but the structural logic of austerity prompts educators to wonder whether instruction in Theory is an efficient use of dwindling resources, especially now that academic publishing (with important exceptions) behaves as though this future, like the “last” wormhole, is collapsing. Given the Faustian articulation of publishing and promotion can advanced study in the humanities and social sciences even be justified today? Paradoxically, students are still expected to know what is less and less on offer. How is Theory to be “handled” (fingered, worked with, fashioned) under such circumstances?

A reading of Theory that in tracing when and where Theory arises in the event of reading proposes how Theory might best be handled in the context of higher education today. Arguing against those who propose to avoid Theory in the name of its putative obsolescence, this text sets out to challenge two aspects of this avoidance. On the one hand, Theory has been set aside in the name of identity politics, that is, the proposition that its intellectual pertinence has been overshadowed by a sense of political urgency construed as at odds with Theory. Theory itself has assumed an identity, a profile. On the other hand, implicit within the avoidance of Theory is a concept of “context” that calls for reflection. Resisting the tendency to treat context as either negligible or obvious, this text sets out to trace, in the when and where of Theory, the rudiments of a “sociographic” (think “historiographic”) account of context. In relation to it, the reading that is Theory can be usefully situated as part of a politics of higher education in the era of the global crisis of the university.

This argument is advanced through a series of readings that produce eccentric, sociographic accounts of important (some quite unusual) texts or performances of Theory. As such they enact an attention to reading that is advanced as an instance of “offering” as called for in the title.

Acknowledgments; The Pretext; Introduction: Theory in Limbo; 1. Queer Resistance: Foucault and the Unnamable; 2. Stumbling on Analysis: Psychoanalysis and Everyday Life; 3. Strangers in Analysis: Nationalism and the Talking Cure; 4. “Jamming”; 5. WWJD?; 6. What Said Said; 7. Apart from Theory; 8. Conclusion: Theory Is Out There; References; Index.

Sujets

• EDUCATION
• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy
• Literary criticism
• Literary theory

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 04 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785274084
• Langue: English

Extrait

Offering Theory
Offering Theory
Reading in Sociography
John Mowitt
… and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains.
(Gen. 22:2)
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
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This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
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Copyright © John Mowitt 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936151
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-406-0 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-406-6 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
For the recently departed, Jim, Tim and Gary
And for the recently arrived, Sabine Elizabeth
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
The Pretext
Introduction: Theory in Limbo
1. Queer Resistance: Foucault and the Unnamable
2. Stumbling on Analysis: Psychoanalysis and Everyday Life
3. Strangers in Analysis: Nationalism and the Talking Cure
4. “Jamming”
5. WWJD?
6. What Said Said
7. Apart from Theory
8. Conclusion: Theory Is Out There
References
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Aware of the countless voices that have pricked my ears, my habit is to be long-winded in acknowledging them. However, “the world” (Brexit, Trump, Hong Kong, Brazil, Venezuela and now COVID-19) has taken my breath away. Not quite speechless, but almost. Thus, beyond Jeffrey Di Leo and Megan Greiving at Anthem, only the bare essentials.
The readings that comprise this text straddle two continents. In 2013 I ended my long affiliation with the University of Minnesota and the department I helped invent, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, to join the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, at the University of Leeds. Colleagues and friends from both institutions deserve my gratitude whether welcomed or not.
At Minnesota I am thinking especially of Cesare Casarino, Vinay Gidwani, Qadri Ismail, Michal Kobialka, Richard Leppert, Tom Pepper, J. B. Shank, Ajay Skaria and Shaden Tageldin as well as Lisa Disch, Andreas Gaillus, Rembert Hüser, Premesh Lalu, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Verena Mund, Anaïs Nony, Simona Sawhney, Naomi Scheman and Adam Sitze who, like me, have since moved on.
At Leeds the list is short, but growing. I especially want to acknowledge the provocations of Jason Allen-Paissant, Barbara Engh, Gail Day, Sam Durrant, Eric Prenowitz as well as Adrian Rifkin, Marcel Swiboda (who, among other brilliant things, prepared the index) and Jane Taylor, all of whom have since left.
Since coming to Leeds my more irregular affiliations with the University of Western Cape and with the University of Fort Hare have deepened considerably. Many of the concepts invented in the chapters that follow developed out of these friendships and I want especially to acknowledge the voices of Maurits van Bever Donker, Heidi Grunebaum, Patricia Hayes, Gary Minkley, Ross Truscott and the unfathomably deep talent pool gathered around them.
In this spirit somewhat more formal thanks are owed to the various friends and colleagues who have invited me to address them, their colleagues and students on the matter of Theory: Karyn Ball at the University of Alberta, Jonathan Bordo and Andrew Wernick at Tent University, Paul Bouissac at the University of Toronto, Griselda Pollock at the University of Leeds, Tilottama Rajan at the University of Western Ontario, Lynn Turner at Goldsmiths, the organizers of “The Humanities Improvised” (notably Premesh Lalu and Jim Chandler) at the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, seminar leaders (especially Jeffrey Di Leo and Zahi Zalloua) at the American Comparative Literature Association and the organizers at the Cultural Studies Association (notably Patricia Clough and Randy Johnson). Enablers all.
As the bicontinental character of these pieces might suggest, some of them, in various iterations and guises, have appeared in print before. Formal acknowledgment of their sources appears as stipulated by the presses granting permission to recycle. I am professionally grateful to them all: Canadian Journal of Comparative Literature , Taylor and Francis and Symplokē . More directly though I want to acknowledge and thank Peggy Kamuf for helping me gain access to the Jacques Derrida papers held in Special Collections at the Langson Library at UC-Irvine and for permitting me to cite from the as-yet unpublished seminar, “Language and the Method of Discourse.”
But if “essentials” is the watchword of these remarks, two more personal acknowledgments are in order. First and foremost, I want to thank Jeanine, Rosalind and Rachel for their patience and generosity during the interminable gestation of these thoughts. Jeanine Ferguson in particular continues to humble me with her wisdom, her willingness to try out titles, turns of phrase, topics and remain, in spite of it all, in my company. With endless gratitude and affection.
Lastly, I want to thank “mi bibliotecario,” Jose Rodriguez Dod, a very early collaborator who, with his wife Eloisa, has routinely welcomed me into his home and its boundless shelves of all those texts you didn’t know you needed until you did. A near fatal illness almost broke off our friendship. I am thankful it did not.
THE PRETEXT
This study traces various iterations of the question: when or where is Theory today? Its aim is not to avoid the question, “what is Theory?,” but to subordinate that question to the prior one. At stake in this subordination is the conviction that the “essential” question, the “what” question, leads too quickly to an archival impasse where movements, debates, national traditions, figures, births, deaths and so on impose an order on Theory that reduces it largely to the intellectual property of publishers and universities. And not just any publishers and universities, but far too typically ones in what have come to be called the North and the West, both designations that Theory now includes within the modes of its own self-doubt. Here, and the problem is a familiar one, Theory immediately undergoes a metamorphosis when confronted with the dilemma of application, whether understood methodologically ( can Theory x be applied to object y, and to what effect?) or politically ( should Theory from intellectual heritage x be applied to objects from another?). These are not false problems, it is just that the power of their falsity is too limited to be especially generative. They make the “when or the where” of Theory seem less interesting than they might otherwise be by, in effect, folding a single when and a single where into what Theory is. Or, as is more often heard today, what Theory was .
This invocation of the grammatical distinction between the past and the present points to something that will matter in what follows. Hovering, like a “third ear,” above or behind the “when or where” of Theory is a proposition about context. More particularly, the question “when is Theory?” reads like a historical question, just as “where is Theory?” reads like a social or cultural question. History, society, culture are all ways to think what context designates in the protocols of critical analysis. That said, at issue here is not a banal “contextualization” of Theory (others have scorched this earth), and this for two reasons. First, what seems worth fussing over in the “when or where” of Theory is something more like its “occasion,” “event” or “performance,” where what is foregrounded is how what we might provisionally call “theoretical effects” arise, where the enunciation of Theory can be traced in the emergence of its statements or, in the jargon of application, its arguments, those pieces of prose exposition folks trained philosophically are adept at parsing (separating into parts).
Second, at risk in the labor of contextualization is the theoretical presupposition of context itself. To invoke a commonplace, context is typically compared and insistently contrasted with text, but is this really anything more than a gesture of convenience and thus a sign of intellectual impatience? Grasped in its historical materiality, that is, etymologically, “context” derives from Latin where it plainly says: weave ( texere ) with or together ( con ). Here the warp and the woof, the strands woven together and across, cannot be grasped as contrasting with one another in the way that text is now typically contrasted with context. In fact, if one has been paying attention, this weaving is precisely what text came to designate in the mo(ve)ment, now, with some justice, derided, as post structuralism. Indeed, it is perhaps only within this derisive posturing that text is insistently deprived of this etymological force, a telling symptom of which is the proposition that texts are simply, strictly