The Battlegrounds of Theory

Abstract

The most important contribution made by the interdisciplinary field of to intellectual may well be questioning of the unidisciplinary model of 'history' as the sole paradigm for studying relationships between different thinkers. Tilottama Rajan & Michael J. O'Driscoll, After Poststructuralism The past as always has been and always will be necessarily configured, troped, emplotted, read, mythologised and ideologised in ways to suit ourselves. Keith Jenkin, Why History? PRACTICE IS ALWAYS ALREADY THEORY. (1) Notwithstanding familiar views to the contrary and impatience in some fields with what is perceived to be too much attention to at the expense of practice, (2) it is possible to argue that is as old as language and culture. But as study in its own right, assuredly interdisciplinary, and parading itself as irresistibly difficult as well as inevitable, theory's place in the curriculum as is very recent. And what development it has been. Given our propensity for innovation, underscored by all of those apocalyptic murmurings and institutional imperatives, theory's battleground is packed with heroic figures, claims, counter-claims, returns, re-runs and occasional acts of vilification. As the wars give way to minor skirmishes, camp followers mop up around the edges and we gather our energies for the next negotiation. Following the linguistic turn and poststructuralism's unsettling of comfortable notions of origin, continuity and evolutionary progression, there is indeed, as the editors of After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of concede, special challenge in writing an intellectual of Theory. The point is, of course, that History gives way to histories and, in the best of all possible senses, after poststructuralism is an inclusive not exclusive discourse, the interest and values of which will depend not so much upon reduced notions of linearity, nor indeed of newness, but upon subtleties of argument in the remaking of connections. (3) Written from the near side of the contemporary turn to in the humanities (3), these essays are characteristically well-informed, investigative and demanding; they make valuable contribution to thinking about as an interdisciplinary field (of battle) whose connections, interests and applications are decidedly provocative and multifarious. The editors arrange the contributions around four metatheoretical figures or tropics of theory which, they point out, are not exhaustive but heuristic: genealogies, performativities, physiologies and technologies. The boundaries are porous and, as the essays indicate, processes of contamination and combination refigure the field. Choosing Foucault's term, they emphasize the ways in which invites rereading of history attentive to the blind spots of misrecognition and aporia and to complicated forms of interplay. Performativity is a synchronic counterpart to genealogy (5) that allows for staging, as it were, outside chronology and influence. When it is linked to Derrida's repetition with difference, it nevertheless holds an each-way bet by allowing the performance trope its specificity while holding, as well, to the ghosts of connection. Physiology is held to allow libidinal economy of history, one with an investment of anxiety, abjection, desire or attachment in ways held to be closer than the rhetoric of mere influence. Technologies is deployed with respect not to the machinic but to the technologies of language, the construction of subjects and of writing--that is to say, by foregrounding the hard edge of self-conscious practice itself. Situated in Part I Genealogies, Stanley Corngold returns to Hegel's Aesthetics through de Man's Aesthetic Ideology, focusing on the of comedy located towards the end of the Aesthetics. It is by detecting the rumblings of repressed contradictions (37), such as the problematic relationship between substance and subjectivity but also between tragedy and comedy themselves and their association respectively with the absolute and the ephemeral, that he defines the difficulties and discontinuities of a great ironist (37). …