Interruption Continuation

I remembered that there was a chapter in Jameson's book Postmodernism entitled 'Theory'. The initial Theory in question here is that of Walter Benn Michaels and Stephen Knapp, as featured in Against Theory. Anyway, the definition of theory here is an interestingly restricted one, at least according to Jameson:

Theory = '"the tendency to generate theoretical problems by splitting apart terms that are in fact inseparable". This tendency is tehn identified and localised in two kinds of privileged error: the separation of "authorial intention and the meaning of texts", and a larger, or more 'epistemological' pathology, in which 'knowledge' is separated from 'beliefs', generating teh notion that we can now somehow "stand outside our beliefs", such that "theory" now becomes "the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without".

So, that's one point, and the thought that came to mind was that, regarding any definition of T/theory, one might always productively ask: what here would count as non-theory, or the opposite of theory (is it 'practice', is it 'Reason and Evidence' (!), is it 'analytical philosophy' or what?

Second thing of interest in Jameson's chapter is what he says about New Historicism, which was at the time (1991) the 'latest thing'. Jameson thinks that if this name corresponds to anything it is less ideological or intellectual content than a 'shared writing practice'. But he goes on to say that New Historicists are, in a sense, simply those who felt interpellated or were compelled to answer the label 'New Historicism'. Here it is in Jameson-ese:

"A crucial component of my particular situation as a unique individual
is always the general category to which I am also condemned by other
people and which I must therefore come to terms with (Sartre said assume) in any way I like - shame, pride, avoidance behavior - but which I cannot expect to have removed just because I am somebody special. ..A New Historicist, as Sartre might have said, is one whom other people consider a New Historicist. In our other terminology, this means, in effect, that individual immanence is here in tension with a certain transcendence, in the form of seemingly external, collective labels and identities."

Theorists are those people who, from a certain point of view, appear to be doing a single thing called Theory. This last (to parody FJ), is nothing but the name given to a kind of objective mirage, generated by distance and unfamiliarity, but then projected back onto the object itself. Those quite diverse individuals singled out by this name, nonetheless appropriate it in strategic defiance, hoping to evade the disempowerment of their interpellation by heroically becoming it.