Theory is the opiate of the thinking classes.

that may be the trick with this, eh? to see the attraction without falling madly, deeply for it.

Yipe. See, I don’t think it was an ‘analysis’ per se. I saw it more as a personal experience thing. The only authority she claims is in having been one of THOSE people. The main thrust i think is her observation that THEORY people abound in left-minded circles. It IS enthralling, but it can lead to a life of abstraction, with the real world problems left, y’know, over THERE. She seent it with her own two eyes. Now, who you gonna believe?

My problem with this particular article is that the writer confessed to being as a lover who has fallen out of love. I tend to find such people of questionable judgement (for the falling in such love in the first place) and at least an emotional inaccuracy at the back end. It is like someone addicted to self help books, the new one is always the one that is going to fix everything, the last one was “stupid, why did I ever go for that?”

I prefer a more cool head analysis myself.

p.s. not sure what you’re sayin here, Pete. Too shallow? What did the piece need more theory?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a Marxist. But I think “theory” cropped up at a time when the academy needed something to protect its endowments and assure a future cash flow. It was a time when donors felt bad about the revolutionary aspects of education… students were thinking for themselves and they were charmed by simplistic formulations in the reddish wavelengths.

I don’t know enough about this shit to jump in and criticize from a well built foundation, and my approach to it is prejudiced. But the following passage really spoke to me. It reinforced some of those feelings I have about “theory” and post-modernisticism in general…

“…unlike self-help and therapy, which never claimed to be anything but psycho-spiritual Darwinism, Theory draped itself in revolutionary verbiage and pretended to be a political movement.”

There are other clues in the send-up that Golub wrote (linked in my preceding post), things about examination of power relationships and broad assertions of the novelty of same in the pomo context… things about the non-objective nature of science.

“Theory” was a way for seventies liberal academics to regain control of an academy moving uncomfortably far to the left. In all the thousands of pounds of printed matter, garbage, produced by the high priests and student acolytes of this new religion there were gemstones relevant at least to literary criticism and epistemology. The philosophical underpinnings of all this were - for the true believers - forgivably fascist. It all provided a counterpoint to Communism and it left real progressive politics and socialist solutions to public policy problems in the dust bin.

These are all feelings, unfounded on facts, very post-modern of me I think… for me this provides the basis of at least an hypothesis, if not a THEORY.