Maybe it's because of the spring, another pollen-infested spring that brings with it the bane of allergies, and maybe these allergies have started to affect my brain like they always do, but I think I've had just about enough of critical theory.
Oh, don't sit there and pretend you don't know what critical theory is, because I know you do, even if you don't call it "critical theory." It's the stuff that keeps 95 percent of academics from being unemployed (excepting, of course, the research scientists, but we'll spare them a bashing this time, at least).
Critical theory is a facilitator, I think, in driving many college students completely insane. Theorists write in what amounts to a foreign language, discuss ideas so wholly in the abstract as to make them impossible to visualize conceptually, and work off texts that half the time you haven't read, meaning you're still only getting one side of the dialogue, as usual. It was enough, at least, to drive me completely insane. Perhaps you have a different threshold.
One group of people who have really taken a shine to critical theory are feminists. Realizing that centuries have passed without a significant female voice contributing to the conversation, feminists take the old dead white male theory and give it a powerful new interpretation, one that is effectively known as, appropriately enough, feminist critical theory. Suddenly we got Marxism from a woman's point-of-view, existentialism from a woman's point-of-view, and so forth.
Feminist critical theory is not without its problems, principal among them its reliance on a lot of dead white male critical theory, be it Marx or Freud or Derrida or Sartre or Lacan -- it's hard to pen the new feminist subject consciousness manifesto when working out of the void of Euro-masculine writings. It may be frustrating when all the ideas have already been proposed, and all you can do is situate them in a different gender space.
"Gender space," by the way, is a phrase that may not actually mean anything, but it's certainly indicative of the bizarre kind of language used by critical theorists. Here's another one: "discursive field of force." A field of force reminds me of something from physics, the strong or the weak force, maybe, but that's not at all what critical theorists are referencing when they use these words. We're also not talking about the comic book use of the word, "force field," which is something the Fantastic Four might use to defend themselves against the evil machinations of Doctor Doom or some other unsightly fellow.
In fact, I'm not at all sure just what a field of force is. But it's definitely discursive, which basically means rambling. So, a rambling field of force is some sort of energy, some motion, that won't stick to one subject but crosses all over the place, or something, and, uh, it's really important to, uh, take it seriously, because it's rambling, and it's a field, you know, a field of force, and, uh, um, well, that's it, I guess.
And quite frankly, sometimes all critical theory gets so far into the realm of abstruse hypotheses and dialectics that it seems to metamorphose from useful meta-narrative into, well, mental masturbation.
Usually this transformation occurs just after the critical theory has lost its last possibility for applicability in the real world. Have you ever tried to live the poststructuralist lifestyle? Just try to be poststructuralist ordering a sandwich in the Collis Cafe, see how far you get. You can only deconstruct a sandwich so far before you're left with two slabs of bread and a swatch of meat that you're forced to make yourself.
I know what you're thinking: "I read this whole column, I keep waiting for the point, and, as usual, there is none. How do I get suckered into this game of fluff week after week?"
Well, here's a point where you could put some critical theory to good use. Consider all the reasons I might be writing such fluffy columns. The Marxist intepretation -- what does my column have to do with the struggle of the proletariat? Well, maybe not a whole lot. What about a psychoanalytic interpretation? Maybe I'm just working out my castration anxiety on the printed page. Perhaps somewhere within this column lurks the Lacanian phallus. Or maybe I'm a neo-colonialist. I could be a swashbuckling imperialist co-optive chivalric neo-pseudo-quasi vampirist.
Or it could just be the allergies.
