My beef with theory infused writing

It's ahistorical

Theory people in academia believe that they are changing the world, one made up word or neologism at a time. The problem is, we are being remade all the time, but by material problems we want to escape.

We live in an age of too much information, not enough context or history, so it feels good sometimes to just bury your head in the sand, or a Duke University Press monograph. Doesn’t feel good to me, but there are enough people in my profession who deeply and sincerely believe obscure writing = smarts. It has emerged that raising tuition at Universities where people like me work and study is a form of commitment to maintaining high income streams on your balance sheets in order to securitize complex debt instruments that keep expenditures low on those self same sheets. That was a mouthful. I try to explain what financialization of the University looks like here in Business Insider.

If you look at my Twitter feed, people who defend theory speak in literary criticism tell me that I am not qualified to teach writing, I am reading theory stuff in bad faith. I’m just taking sentences from Lauren Berlant’s work and asking myself, “What if I had to comment on this writing as a teacher?”

I was so frustrated by reading her book on sentimentality, Female Complaint, that I decided to livetweet it.

Berlant seems to take 370 pages to say that in American culture, politics and literature, sentimentality is a form of feminine communication that allows “nondominant” people (in this case women) to form communities of public intimacy sometimes mediated through the commodity and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Defenders of theory and certain English professors will tell you I’m vulgar and reductive. I’m trying to grow thicker skin. I have other fish to fry right now. Some day I might go back to a fuller critique of her work, maybe in the trauma book, maybe not.

I have no real beef with Berlant’s basic argument, except it ignores the history of media, how day time TV capitalized on this form of marketing feelings and how this is not a positive political development for democracy because all those feelings disguise the fact that feelings have become a field of surveillance and exploitation.

There is a lot of hand waving at capitalism and neoliberalism in theory speak, but little effort to understand how obscurantism is implicated in the marketing of specialization and professionalization.

Mike Davis’ City of Quartz is the gold standard for me for good writing, good political analysis and good history. Compare that book about Los Angeles with Fredric Jameson’s essay on the Westin Bonaventure hotel and post-modernism and you will see how Davis’ work opens up history to politics and Jamesons obscures history for theory.