Avidly Reads Theory - Softcover

Stein, Jordan Alexander

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1479801003 ISBN 13: 9781479801008

Verlag: New York University, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

"Theory offered us a way of understanding the world that, like so many youthful exuberances, was both vital and ridiculous."
As an avowed "theory head," Jordan Alexander Stein confronts a contradiction: that the abstract, and often frustrating rigors of theory also produced a sense of pride and identity for him and his friends: an idea of how to be and a way to live. Although Stein explains what theory is, this is not an introduction or a how-to. Organized around five ways that theory makes us feel-silly, stupid, sexy, seething and stuck-Stein travels back to the late nineties to tell a story of coming of age at a particular moment and to measure how that moment lives on now.
Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly-an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books-specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author's emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life. This is a story about the emotional lives of ideas.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jordan Alexander Stein teaches in the English department and the Comparative Literature program at Fordham University.

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Avidly Reads Theory

By Jordan Alexander Stein

New York University Press

Copyright © 2019 New York University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4798-0100-8

Contents

Preface, xiii, 
1. Silly Theory, 1, 
2. Stupid Theory, 23, 
3. Sexy Theory, 47, 
4. Seething Theory, 75, 
5. Stuck Theory, 99, 
Coda, 125, 
Acknowledgments, 129, 
Works Consulted, 133, 
About the Author, 141, 

CHAPTER 1

SILLY THEORY

Some years ago, I found myself at twenty-four-hour vegetarian diner in a California college town, breakfasting with a dear friend. We had ordered coffee, but the main course was psychoanalysis. "You can't read Lacan without Hegel," I assured her earnestly. She broke into a grin, paused for a brief, dramatic moment, and then sang my words back to me, to the tune of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger's "You Can't Always Get What You Want," hitting the second syllable of "Hegel" in a flat F.

College brimmed with capital-T theory: that interdisciplinary set of literary and critical writings that blend Continental philosophy with qualitative sociology and theories of "the text." As generations of college students have noted, theory is often stylistically difficult and menacingly abstract, as obscure to the uninitiated as any other kind of heavy thinking, and yet way too cool to be called simply "philosophy." My friends and I were theory heads. We elected to read the Germanic sentences penned by French absurdists, and we had a great time doing so. We were young and smug and deconstructed. In the classrooms and bookshops of fin-de-siècle California, we staked the foundation for our educations in an incisive critique of foundationalist thinking. We saw the irony, and we embraced it with the kind of reflexive detachment that today's fashionistas could only hope to conjure when they declare that something is "so Nineties."

Detached as it may have been, our experience of reading theory was far from dry. As the Jagger-cum-Lacan anecdote suggests, my college years embraced theory as though participating in what Lauren Berlant (in an essay I read over and over) called "a counter-politics of the silly object." We had a million puns (Kristeva? Whateva! Bourdieu? Bored me too! Understand deconstruction? You de Man!) We plotted the names of bands (Foucault's Hos, The Heidegrrrls) and cocktails (notably the Pink Freud, whose recipe I don't think we ever perfected but nearly all of whose iterations involved a banana). I wrote the treatment for a play called "Rendt: A Musical about AID," which replaced the transvestite character in Jonathan Larson's Broadway smash with a young, bohemian Hannah Arendt (also played by a transvestite). We created Lacanian drinking games for our favorite movies ("sip your Pink Freud when being and having are confused in a condition of lack"). And in perhaps my most starstruck celebrity sighting ever, I one day had the thrill of walking through a Longs Drugstore three paces behind Angela Davis, who (perhaps unaware of me, perhaps all too used to being followed) appeared to be doing nothing more revolutionary than buying cold medicine.

Playing silly games with serious ideas provided us with a way to lavish attention on the scene of our learning. It seems clear in retrospect that the actions of my college friends and me were not about theory, the object, but about creating a reflexive awareness of the context in which that object could (in fact did) circulate: through the space of early-morning diners and late-night parties, through the hands of amateur mixologists and bargain shoppers, and through the educational transformations of public school graduates into fledgling intellectuals. We aimed for some reciprocity between the serious things we were learning in school and rather less serious register in which we were living our lives outside of it.

It's in the same silly spirit that my students and their peers now turn highbrow theoretical ideas into goofy memes. Tired puns (advertisements for Freudian slippers) and doctored images (Friedrich Engels on the cover of "Cosmarxpolitan" magazine) occupy whole pages or feeds on platforms like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. I read them with a burning sense of having missed out on their expansion into a visual domain of the kind of bad jokes that require a considerable education for one to earn the pleasure of finding them resoundingly stupid. Still, other contemporary attempts at silliness are more direct and more reminiscent of the jokes my friends and I made in college. Or, as a very bright young woman once wrote, unbidden, on her final exam for my intro theory course, "Your mama's so classless, she could be a Marxist utopia."

* * *

The grand alchemy for turning ideas into lives began, in my case, entirely inauspiciously. Introduction to Literary Theory was the only required class for my undergraduate major. It was offered every term, though the course varied by instructor, usually combining some elements of a survey — that is, some background in twentieth-century theories of language and representation — with emphasis on the particular professor's specialty. In the spring of my sophomore year, the professor happened to be a specialist in Russian modernism, and we spent half of the ten-week quarter studying theories of Russian formalism, which, for all their avant-garde provocation, had lost more than a little something in translation.

For the in-class midterm, our professor, straining for relevance to our contemporary situation, screened the video for the even-then-ignoble pop band Hanson's fourth single, "Weird," to be followed by an analytical essay in blue book. If this was an effort to connect theory to life, it faltered considerably. What I learned was, rather, an astonishing lesson in the coordination of formal and critical incoherence, because none of it made any sense. (The Hanson brothers, whatever more generous interpreters might find their merits to be, bear precious little on the theories of Viktor Shklovsky.) As pedagogical tragedies go, it was ordinary enough. Though when the class implausibly screened the very same benighted Hanson video again in the last week of the term, at the behest of a guest lecturer who seemed not to know we'd already been asked to view and analyze it, what had once been tragedy was now clearly farce. It all felt pretty silly, but not in a good way. If there was a lesson here, it had to do with how not to live.

The thing that piqued my interest that term had nothing to do with all these things we were focusing on. It was instead a reading sneaked into the sixth or seventh week, an essay by Jacques Derrida called "White Mythology." In what I now recognize as a classic of poststructuralist high theory, Derrida's sixty-page tour de force presents a rigorous deconstruction of the distinction between content and style in philosophical writing, showing how you can't have content without style and vice versa, how the two concepts fundamentally depend on each other, and ultimately going so far as to suggest that there is only a delusive difference between the language we use to represent reality and reality itself.

But I missed all that. I didn't walk away from the essay appreciating Derrida's critique of representation, which, arguably, is the whole point. What intrigued me, instead, was the operation of deconstruction. It fascinated me to think about dependence in Derrida's terms. Though generally unconcerned with how philosophical discourse worked, I was alive to the possibility that reality and the representation of reality depend on each other, such that reality is...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: New York University
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1479801003
• ISBN 13: 9781479801008
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 152
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande