For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
03-21-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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Theory has nothing to do with real life. Don’t you know that by now, K? Name one thing about theory that is important to anything you do in life. Just one.
Interesting, because here in my department the exact opposite is true. Theory rules and anyone who doesn’t enjoy it is a traitor, or extremely suspect at least. I agree that practicing theory can fall into the trap of being nothing more than a purely intellectual excercise (and is it really a “trap”? what’s wrong with a life of the mind anyway?), but if theory has nothing to do with real life, it’s the fault of the practitioner’s own myopia, not this grand thing called “Theory.”
I think it has less to do with theory and more to do with hostility towards the humanities in general. I’m not a theory person myself, although I do enjoy reading and discussing it. My intellectual pursuits deal more with literature, linguistis, poetry, prosody, etc.; however, I often get the same response that English Literature or the study of English Literature (especially poetry), has little, if anything to do with “real life.” My response: learning to read and think and write with a critical eye is important…
Oh Shit. I just saw the time. I have more to say but I have to run off to work. More later.
@ Kevin
I do recall the wars that broke out in the Textual Studies Department. Grad school began with a uni-wide introduction to teaching, pedagogy, etc. where we all got to mix it up with newly inducted gradstuds from assorted disciplines.
I was in a group with a few people from the Creative Writing program. Later, I took a theory course offered by the Textual Studies Dept. (Heh. It was criticial theory. I thought criticial theory was of the Frankfurt School/Habermas/Marxist sort. Boy! Did I get straightened out.)
But man, what a mess with the Creative Writing people really pissed of at the LitCrit people — and all of them kind of caught in the academic wars at the time.
My own dept went through its own similar wars — and I was caught in the midst of it, too. I’d been accepted on the basis of a thesis in strictly theory, only to enter right after the Almost Dead White guys were ejected from power. Thus, I was told: theory was dead. Get with the program!
More later as I have to pay the bills, too. :)
Well, it’s pretentious to name-drop fancypants theorists without actually talking about theory, which is more or less what I was trying to do with Lacan.
@yami
Still don’t get why that’s pretentious.
I don’t actually know the first thing about Lacan, but by name-dropping I can create an illusion or pretense of familiarity. Mentioning Lacan in a silly aside, wholly undemanded and unsupported by the actual body of the post, is merely a show of knowledge intended to impress people. How is that possibly not pretentious?
Actually talking about theory would quickly expose my ignorance and undermine the pretense.
It was the opposite in my grad program even though it was cultural studies which has a strong emphasis on praxis as well as theory. Among the feminists in the program, theory was emphasized even more, which I often saw as an attempt to sort of show that we could theorize with the best of them (men). Anyway, I am in no way anti-theory. I believe in a balance, and I believe that it isn’t doing anyone any good to be too cute with it. That, for me, was what Butler often does–among others.
Also, I think the theory/non-theory is a false dichotmoy. Was it Barbara Christian that wrote an essay on this? Anyway, to me its like the essentialist/non-essentialist dichotomy. Neither one is black and white—gray everywhere. People set them up to make points or to show superiority because in the academic world I came up in, theory is always privledged. But any good theory trickes down to praxis, and if it doesn’t then it isnt worth a good god damn.
There was an easier way to say all that. It isnt pretentious to discuss theory, but it can be discussed pretentiously.
What Myrna said. Which is true of anything, really.
I’m not against theory–hell, everyone’s got one, even at the most rudimentary level–I just like it when I feel like the theorist has at least one foot planted on this mortal coil as well.
The biggest problem I have with theory is that it’s too easy for someone to abuse the theory. This has been a problem in philosophy since the beginning, but it is softened a bit through training in logic and rhetoric, so one doesn’t use a theory as an appeal to authority and is less likely to reach a wrongful conclusion due to flawed reasoning. A second problem is in definitions–once you define a term for use in a given theory, you don’t have the luxury of disregarding your own definition or of expanding it beyond the theory’s reach.
Beyond that–bring it on.
Yami: “I don’t actually know the first thing about Lacan, but by name-dropping I can create an illusion or pretense of familiarity. Mentioning Lacan in a silly aside, wholly undemanded and unsupported by the actual body of the post, is merely a show of knowledge intended to impress people. How is that possibly not pretentious? Actually talking about theory would quickly expose my ignorance and undermine the pretense.”
I didn’t read mentioning Lacan as a silly aside in relation to a post that mentioned Marxist theory and Foucault, let alone Kuhn. Lacan, in that context, would be completely relevant.
Most people use pretentious, however, against others and not themselves, as you suggest you’re doing. If one doesn’t actually know the person particularly well, let alone know the theories, one can’t actually make a judgment that someone is pretending to know something that they don’t really know.
I cry tears of sadness for the state of self-deprecating humor on the internet, I really do.
@ yami
Kleenex?
Thanks :)