If you’re polling: I don’t hate theory but I don’t anticipate it heartily, that’s for sure. I’m more interested in mastering the texts and mastering the criticism than I am in original scholarship. If I have a different idea, fine. If not, fine.

But I’m sure all your other fine readers will provide some insight on your pedagogical questions. :)

While I was on vacation, I visited a friend of my partner’s who was a physicist at Bell Labs during its glory days, and who still consults for technology firms in his retirement. He’d just read Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense, and, thus enlightened, declared all philosophy to be worthless. It may be rude to contentiously dispute a point with one’s host, but I’d brought two bottles of good wine, so I figured I had a pass on that point of etiquette. A single data point in favor of the proposition that substantial accomplishment in one field is no proof against anti-intellectual philisitinism towards others.

I actually used to be one of those whose gut-level instincts told me that theory was just a bunch of BS. It wasn’t until I read a bit more that I came across an argument in one text (I’ll avoid name-dropping for now, because that’s almost always a drag) that people generally approach the subject that way because of its difficulty.

Everything in theory is so intertextual that, at first, it’s just overwhelming at first. The strange thing is that people are so ready to dismiss it because of that, and because of the level of abstraction that theory works on.

Take a subject like Nuclear Physics or Rocket Science or whatever, which is just as unapproachable at the beginning, and people say that one just has to take the time and eventually everything will be made clear.

I wonder what it is about theory that makes people just so damn hostile that they’d be willing to give it the same benefit of the doubt. I suspect that your point about the black turtleneck guy might be one of the reasons.

Which, Rob, is why I was glad to see your comment about nuclear physics and such, and I wonder if — in addition to the difficulty factor and the arrogant dorkiness of some people who sublimate their insecurity and lack of social graces into becoming “experts” on one theorist or another — it’s also the instrumentality effect or technology bigotry.

But I look at this and look at my previous posts where I talk about the same thing and realize that it’s just something I can’t let alone, because I can’t figure out why it’s such a vexed topic. So I’m sure I’ll be back worrying at this old bone three or four months from now. (Maybe I’ll revisit what cranky old Mr. Fish has to say about the topic, or check out Mr. Mitchell and the Critical Inquiry crew. Well, wait — there’s that dissertation thing. So maybe not.)