The Tribute of Theory?

For a genuinely dialectical criticism, indeed, there can be no pre-established categories of analysis: to the degree that each work is the kind of end result of a kind of inner logic or development in its own content, it evolves its own categories and dictates the specific terms of its interpretation.

(Fredric Jameson)

It seems to me that the implications of this statement for theory are interestingly the reverse of what is often implied. That is to say, the work demands that we invent the categories appropriate to its interpretation. Conversely, we must re-think and if necessary discard the existing categories, even where the ‘existing categories’ have lost the name of ‘categories’ and become the very the shape of our intuitions.

In order to be true to the work, we must be able to recast these old shapes, and produce concepts and measures capable of seeing a work for what it is - rather than have it appear as simply nonsensical or a ‘deviation’ from generic or aesthetic judgements in any case inappropriate to it and unable to gauge its specificity.

Now it is this production of new concepts and categories (and the simultaneous revision or destruction of assumed categories) which some might define as theory itself.

It’s a cliché that Theory is what we do when something becomes problematic. We only need a theory of writing or a theory of the novel when such things are no longer self-evident, or when what is before us does not simply agree with the available modes of perception. By the light of these available modes, things do not add up, there are meaningless details, blind spots. New optics must be tried so that (what had been) meaningless or deviant or deficient points are reconfigured and restored to sense and intelligibility.

Theoretical activity, far from being an imposition on the work, an artificial ‘cookie-cutter’, is precisely a sign of fidelity to it. That you have been required by the work to reorientate your thinking so that the work can become truly visible – this is the tribute of theory.