When Comments Grow up to be Posts
In the comments below, I left this steaming mess…
The article spoke to me in several ways. I am new to so-called
"THEORY" myself. Intuitively I reject it. It seems to me to be a huge
presenting as fevered intellectuality complicated by excessive
verbosity oozing from festering pustules covering the cultural body of
humanity. I don’t feel good about "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.
