After Theory: From Textuality to Attunement with the World

Abstract

In its heyday-the decade after 1968-theory could mean almost anything, from Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis to Habermas's seemingly endless defense of communicative rationality. No matter what word might have meant at time, however, people somehow sensed its importance, and they knew, if they knew absolutely nothing else, that had to do with the text. But now, almost thirty years afterward, people somehow sense that is pass6, and they know, if they still pay attention at all, that it has been displaced by any number of successors: by New Historicism, for instance, and by studies, and by eclectic mix referred to as post-theory. While terms like cultural studies and post-theory circulate as loosely as theory did in its brief golden age, theory's successors all share among themselves at least one identifying feature-a commitment to descending from textuality into particulars of everyday life. Yet today is anything but dead, and it survives through movements that claim to have left it behind. When Judith Butler in Gender Trouble sets out to rethink logic of heterosexuality, she calls on Derrida. When Homi Bhabha, in Redrawing Boundaries, starts to map new terrain of postcolonial studies, he goes back to Barthes and Bakhtin. Although we tend to see ourselves as working in era after theory, truth may be far more complicated-and also far more troubling. We are, perhaps, trapped in theory, and trapped so inextricably that even our most careful efforts to escape keep returning us to isolation that drove us from in first place. And now, when future of our profession has begun to look uncomfortably like a rerun of our past, moment may have come for us to admit that itself brought us here. If world is not a text, then