Things to Consider:

• Eileen Joy's response to my article-in-progress.  (Should I dignify her valid criticisms with another response, or will they evaporate if I studiously ignore them?)
• Mark Kaplan's response to my article-in-progress.  (Do I prefer machines, tools or gramophones?)
• Edible pancakes.  (The box claims they're "for eating.")
• Rich P. and N. Pepperell's discussion of my article-in-progress.  (Should I seek shelter from this rain of pings or accept the drenching I deserve?)
• Whether this is a not-so-subtle dig.  (Who considers "near the city of Caen, in northwestern France" the center of the world?  Are people incapable of thinking through the implications of their snark?)
• The Reek of Hegel's Awesomeness.
• The implications of Sisyphus taking refuge behind poststructuralist theory, and the uselessness of tags.
• Whether the Troll of Sorrow realizes he's an asterisk.  (And how amusing it is that he relegates himself to a footnote.)
  
• Mean people and the likelihood that they suck.  (I don't believe they do . . . but I wouldn't, being a mean person myself.)
• Inedible pancakes and their target audience.

Comments

[Luther Blissett]

Scott, just to push on one of Eileen Joy's comments further -- I don't think you can use Homi Bhabha as an example of the *effects* of the anthologization of theory. First off, you'd need to establish (a) what theory anthologies were available at that time; (b) how widely they were used in universities; and (c) how widely they had traveled to Indian universities.

Actually, I'd argue the other way around: it was critics like Homi Bhabha who *made* the theory anthology necessary for grad students as a means of bringing together all the divers materials being articulated by the critic.

You also might want to check out this interview with Bhabha by WJT Mitchell in *Artforum*:

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/interview.html

Here's a very long excerpt:

WJTM: I want to take up this idea of conceptual generality, the sense in which your work isn't merely an inventory of local situations but an attempt to make clear a picture of the dynamics of authority and subjection -- a picture that could travel, that could move from one situation to another. In other words, you're trying to do the work we call "theory" -- maybe in a weak sense, maybe in a strong sense; this is what I want to find out. What do you think a theory is? Do you want your theories to be "strong," that is, to generate methods, to lead deductively to certain conclusions, to provide a program for research? Or do you think of theory in some "weaker" sense, as a kind of moment of speculation within practice, a moment of reflection? Are you content to have it generate a few intuitions, a few ideas, a few glimpses, or do you expect more than that?

HB: My desire is absolutely not for the dogmatic or deductive effect. That kind of theorization is too mechanistic, too hermetic, and can only ever produce epigones or intradisciplinists. I like disobedience and transdisciplinarity. From that point of view, what is important with theoretical work is that it should in the fullest sense be open to translation. I use the word "translation" here because clearly if we are talking about some kind of attribution, and some kind of descent between a theory and its elaboration, then there is no point in pretending that a particular body of thought doesn't have a priority; there must be a text for it to be translated. It may be a priority that is internally liminal or displaced, but there is something there that endows a particular kind of authorization and authentication. That said, however, what I have been trying to elaborate each time are forms of theorization that in some way embroider on the notion of ambivalence, and ambivalence is a category that cannot be fixed in a kind of hermetic structural relation or functional immanence. Yet it still has to produce a set of concepts, procedures, and strategies that somebody will be able to take up and take elsewhere.

That brings us back to what the ambition of theory may be -- what theory desires. That's difficult to answer, but I think a theory should go beyond illuminating the deep structure of an event, object, or text, should do more than establish or embellish the framing discourse within which this object of analysis is placed. What the theory does first of all is respond to a problem. You look at what you can't use -- you look at the explanations you have for something and you feel that they aren't translatable, that they don't adequately illuminate something about another form of thought, or the event of a thought. So you are moved to begin to rethink.

WJTM: So theory is something that arises in the face of a problem, and it must be translatable. Let me give you back a picture of this theory. It looks like a narrative structure. Theory, in short, would be an act of relocation or dislocation responsive to a moment of wonder, or of anxiety, or of danger. You must shift yourself into some position to narrativize.

HB: You must put yourself elsewhere, or be pushed into another space or time from which to revise or review the problem. This idea that theorists sit and think of first principles in a state of equanimity, and then sort of build their models I simply disagree with that. I think you're first brought up short, in shock. The act of theorizing comes out of a struggle with a certain description of certain conditions, a description that you inherit, and out of the feeling that you have to propose another construction of those conditions in order to be able to envisage "emergent" moments of social identification or cultural enunciation.

The desire for theory, and maybe the desire of theory, is a drive to engage with these "conditions of emergence," in Foucault's phrase -- a phrase I might translate as the "terms of generalization." I mean by that the point at which an event, object, or ideology seeks to authorize itself - to become a representative discourse, a general discourse. It achieves this empowering or over-powering status not merely through the cogency of its own paradigm replicated or mediated into other sites and situations. The work of regulation, appropriation, or authorization requires another kind of risky, indeterminate mimetic process whereby the discourse of authority has to "project" its paradigm onto adjacent and antagonistic fields of meaning and events.

This act of projection -- which is at once an intervention and an attempt to initiate and institutionalize something "extraterritorial" - demands that the boundaries of the authorizing paradigm are themselves breached or displaced as they negotiate the status of generality. There is the breach caused by the resistances of the local, or of the specific, as they are articulated into a generalizing discourse; and there is the breached paradigm of the discourse of authority itself, for that discourse gains its ascendance only through a number of local skirmishes that take place at its discursive boundary and threaten its closure. Theory must therefore intervene in the agonism between the local and the general, the empirical and the conceptual, the instance and the institution, in a strategy of realignment or rearticulation that can negotiate polarizations without acceding to their foundational claims, or being caught within their binary representations. It must work at the very point at which there is an infraction of discursive boundaries, or of the boundedness of an event. The theoretical intervenes in the very movement of displacement that both demarcates and interrogates what it means to be inside and outside a discursive field. By questioning the terms of generality as they attempt, through a process of dissemination, to embed themselves, one can say with some force that theory has no priority over experience

[Rich Puchalsky]

I still like my original comment on this -- when writing about someone like Bhabha, it seems a bit much to assign causation to the anthology. The argument has what I described as "flash"; there's a materialistic narrative from Pagemaker to disciplinary spread to the anthology to the style assumed to be created by the anthology. But it could just as easily be the other way around -- first there was an idea, then people wanted to branch out, found Pagemaker, wrote anthologies, and so on. The last stage, of a grad student being socialized by an anthology, remains the same, but the earlier ones don't. I think that better explains where the later superstars of High Theory come from.

[SEK]

LB:

I don't think you can use Homi Bhabha as an example of the *effects* of the anthologization of theory. First off, you'd need to establish (a) what theory anthologies were available at that time; (b) how widely they were used in universities; and (c) how widely they had traveled to Indian universities.

A couple of things: first, Bhabha got his doctorate from Christ Church, IIRC, so tracing the spread of anthologies is a wee bit easier than you suspect. Second, I don't use Bhabha as an effect per se, at least, I didn't intend to. He's cited in the mid-'80s as "the next big theorist" in articles by Said, Hillis, Derrida, &c. So, to a certain extent, I'm making the argument you suggest: his type of work is one anthologizing impetus, but one among many. That said, as Rich notes, once those anthologies are published -- some 20 in three years -- the problems with causation disappear. Still, I'm not satisfied with that section of the text. (Also, thanks for the interview. Into the stack with you, I say!)

[Luther Blissett]

Here's another Bhabha interview quotation you might find useful:

"Yes, I have certainly been accused of using difficult words and complex formulations. I can only say that I use the language I need for my work. For instance, Hegel's book is difficult, but it's not that Hegel said: "How can I make my reader's life a misery?" He had certain references, allusions, and readings. In my case, such allusions also cause difficulties. I am not interested in being a descriptive and expository writer. Eventually, I make all theoretical framework my own even if I may be drawing upon Foucault, Lacan, and Mahatma Gandhi. The attempt at making new connections, articulating new meanings, always takes the risk of being not immediately comprehensible to readers." (http://www.hindu.com/lr/2005/07/03/stories/2005070300020100.htm)

Scott, thanks for not making me feel too much a moron for not realizing that Bhabha did his graduate work in the UK. For some reason, I remembered something about Bhabha's early essays being typed on an old-fashioned typewriter and mailed in from India, but I think I must have made that up.

I think we might agree that Bhabha's work is sort of a theory anthology before the fact.

[David R. Block]

The troll of sorrows reminds me of a t-shirt I have.

"There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who can understand binary, and those who can't."

[Matt]

Not-so-subtle dig at Irvine and its inhabitants, none of whom I know, openly acknowledged.

[SEK]

All for the best, actually. We're terrible, each and every one us. Now, if you'll excuse me, I see some kittens in dire need of a booting...