Below are just a couple of things rescued from the haloscan. Not a real post, then, and I'm not opening the comments. Any points/ questions and you can of course email me (mark_b_kaplan[at]hotmail[dot]com
Val Cunningham himself concedes that Theory is a ‘huge flag of convenience’. What he means by Theory is, he says, what gets taught as Theory in departments across the country. Hmm. Strictly speaking, what gets taught as Theory is anything from the Russian Formalists to Lacan to Reception theory to Walter Benjamin. The fact that a category has institutional ‘security’ in no way makes it conceptually coherent. (For what it’s worth, Val Cunningham was - shrewdly? - pronouncing himself and English studies ‘post-theory’ back in 1989.)
A recent ‘introduction to Derrida’, inevitably ‘one in a series’, carries the following blurb: “This series demystifies the demigods of Theory.’ Other ‘demigods’ in the series include Heidegger, Jameson, Said and Stuart Hall. The organising ‘concept’ here is little more than a colophon. Something that can be marketed as Theory is more likely to sell than if it was labelled ‘historiography’ or ‘philosophy of language’. Consequently, that a thinker is annexed by ‘Theory’ has more to do with commercial strategy than conceptualisation, and one shouldn’t of course misrecognise the former as the latter.
The institutional pinfold and the publishing colophon, needless to say, need to be examined and their raison d’etre worked out. It is necessary to explain their conditions of emergence etc. But to think that these pinfolds/ colophons deliver to us a ready made concept or denote something like a coherent ‘movement’ is folly.
Incidentally, claims about ‘context’ are I think misunderstood, and this has to do with the unsatisfactory nature of the word itself, which inevitably suggests something like ‘background’ or inessential frame. Thus, reminders that we should look at the context of X category can be met with impatient demands to put aside such peripheral and adventitious stuff and pass on to the thing itself. But the argument about context implies that this ‘context’ is in fact inscribed in the very concept and to such a degree that it is ‘inoperable’. To the extent that a concept opens up and reveals the world in a certain way and from a certain point of view, to the extent that there is, pre-programmed into it, a range of assumptions and implications that cannot simply be shaken off, the concept is the Special Agent of its context and its history. The reverse of this is that the concept is, simultaneously, readable as a clue to the ‘context’ that it serves and reflects. Without this 'context' it is 'bereft of the light that gives it colour'.