Theory: c/d

I think it is usefyl when using any kind of theory to - at each stage of deduction - to refer back to the text and ask yourself if what you have teased out of it is really there, or there because theory has twisted it to that standpoint. Or more importantly if it actually says anything useful about the piece.

I assume that everyone has assumptions. I presume that many have presumptions. I expect that lots have expectations. I suspect that some play host to ideology.

But theory? Maybe, maybe not.

once it even went and put on its pyjamas

I hope this is the most question-begging statement I have ever made on ilx.

I think it's worth it for comedic value.

Probably I believe it too.

The pinefox has maybe the most consistent takes I've ever encountered in such a thoughtful person. I think his refusal to "perform" other people's takes, or modes of talking and thinking, may possibly constitute a theory—that a human being may be consistent and indivisible, the same in private as well as in public? Maybe that's not a theory. But it's not a fact, either.

What about political effect, though? Like a lot of those involved with cultural studies, I used to have the grandiose delusion that my work was actually a way of doing politics. I now think it absurd to believe that thinking and speaking and writing about cultural forms and processes in the ways and in the contexts in which I am ever likely to be able to do it can serve my political beliefs and commitments, or for that matter anyone else's, in any useful way. It's not that cultural studies has no political dimensions; everything, as we so uselessly know, is indeed political. It is just that cultural studies is such an extremely slow and ineffective way to bail the boat. People in academic life who think they are making important political differences for the most part fail to recognise that they are just marching in step with much more powerful forces that are making the real differences. The work of politics is vastly necessary and for the most part tedious; the study of culture is endlessly fascinating and pretty much gratuitous. The legacy of the 1970s was to suggest that politics ought to be natural, organic, expressive, fulfilling, therapeutic, sensuous, stylish, fun: that it should not only be the politics of culture, but cultural politics.

"...everything, as we so uselessly know, is indeed political..." and, similarly, everything, equally uselessly, is theoretical

I'm not sure theory = politics in the Connor article.

[x] is always useful for marking a spot.

However if we go to a more rigid faux scentific line that theories are great touchstones which have been established and one can use, as opposed to our internal personal ever changing theories then you might be getting somewhere. The latter is more important especially if you give it a chance to migrate to become the former (how to turn my opinion into a theory - with rigour).

Yes Tim, but since eng lit is so tied intot he world of literature (merely in authors, book deals and reasons why people buy things) that it would be a significantly different world of literature, as opposed to the potentially very similar world of politics without cultural studies.

Pete, tell that to Michael Crichton.

Tim, I told it to David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury et al.

also don't forget, soylent green = ppl

Lodge and the boys are the equivalent of pressure groups.

(with apologies to N. Dastoor)

yes I'm talking about poststructuralism, postcolonialism, psychoanalytic theory, formalism, etc.

Can this be merely reduced to "the reader contaminates a text and everything they do".

Well philosophically I feel that the text isn't a text till it symbioses with a reader -- splitting hairs re: "contamination"/breathes (new) life into text. Though what I meant with "contamination" was more insidious, insomuch re: formal composition of a paper. In my experience, my personal nuances precede any formally theoretical modes while in the act of reading and extemporaneous analysis, and the contamination occurs while in the act of writing the paper (possibly i.e. concrete, methodical analysis).

Is the reader with their bundle of possibly contradictory ideas consistent with a theory. Possibly not [...] I suggest that what will be left won't be a theory - and certainly not a consistent one - but a jumble of mini-theories [...] which could well be contradictory - leading to our disillusionment in this thing called Theory in the first place.

Pete is OTM, AFAIC. I notice in myself a distinct and consistent set (though officially it may be tangled) of analytical tendencies, though it seems to have encroached on reader response criticism without having been exposed to much of it. I don't notice the contradictions, though I'm sure they're there, though I feel that my disillusionment with Theory is that it filters a text in a way that I don't like, and now it's lunch time.

m-ry-nn I see your point but the way you're using "theory" seems similar to a homosexual accusing a homophobe of being secretly gay.

Maybe points are there to be missed (as well as... taken?).

Probably Foucault had many.

Interesting thread; aspects of it have run away from my ken a little. But I think it has succeeded in digging up around 'theory' a bit. I would say 'problematized' but Rorty has this week persuaded me not to use that word.

(I am reminded of the Nipper's suggestion that a critic should show '*infinite*' sensitivity: an even taller order.)

(Foucault + Nipper surely = Cozen to thread)

Well, maybe more so if you're dealing with the Holy Sonnets

absolutely seen off mate pic.twitter.com/jA6pi6qxB4

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