theory's imp-air

I don't have a theory about this, nor could I, not having read it. I suspect that Big-T Theory is to theory as Blogging (of the BloggerCon persuasion) is to blogging. If that's the case, then it's not so much institutions that are at issue (in the simultaneous Capitalization of an ongoing activity into a Phenomenon with imperial pretensions and reduction of what was an interesting ongoing manifold activity to a subset of recurrent discursive routines that wax large by nibbling each other into subatomic particles) as it is perhaps just a way members of groups have of using each other's words to make central that which only could be central if one were to eliminate nearly everything under the sun.

Interesting texts produce interesting readings, which produce interesting texts. Uninteresting Theories fail to read interesting texts in an interesting manner because that - i.e., reading - would distract Theorists from admiring the charms of their underlying axioms and the social capital of the inevitable coterie.

(My guess is, theory occurs, but not usually in the act of what passes for Theorizing. It lives in the practice of an attentive engagement with objects, and that engagement may as well be called reading, and it is often most productive when Hegelian seriousness is smitten with intoxicating and invigorating airs of matter, form, language.)

As it became clearer that graduate school seemed geared to credential me with the tools to produce uninteresting texts about interesting texts, I booked.

For the rest, cf. Ray Davis.