What does cultural theory do? It maps out the world around us.
This sounds simple, but it isn't, because we live in an almost unimaginably
complex world-system of 6 billion people, comprised of countless
languages, cultures, histories, identities, pasts, presents and futures, all tied together
by mechanisms of global exchange. Theory explores this complexity, trying to
figure out who we are, where we came from and where we might be going. This is
why one of the central features of theory is the category of contradiction, of movement,
change, evolution, devolution, etc. One of the most important tasks of theory
is to think through such metrics, finding ways to compare things,
to relate them to each other, and to use one set of concepts to shed light on another. Often
this means browsing through all sorts of academic disciplines, scientific fields,
discourses, writers and thinkers, because the limitations of one approach can only
be remedied by other approaches.
What does cultural theory not do? Theory has no power over what
does not yet exist; if it tries, then it turns into something else, i.e. aesthetics, the
imaginative portrayal of what may some day come to pass. But that's the job of
artists, not culture-critics (the reverse is also true: artists are in no way responsible
for the interpretation or dissemination of their works). Theory's task is to honor
the utopian promise of culture, by decoding the movement of history within the
work of art and thereby opening the door to the future – not through violence or
trickery, but through an irresistible gentleness, through the solidarity with the
smallest and weakest of things: the fragile, phosphorescent trace of a better
world.
Who theorizes? If you shop, watch TV, see a film, listen to music, or
do anything cultural at all, you theorize. Everyone is a consumer nowadays, which
means that everyone is making aesthetic judgements all the time (we like some movies
and not others, some basketball games were tremendous and others are lousy, etc.). All
cultural theory does is to sit down and reflect on why one movie seemed better
than another, why one work of art says one thing and another says something else.
Isn't your list of theorists just your own personal preference? It sure is.
Theory isn't about agreeing with what someone else wrote, but about understanding
what they wrote, why they wrote it, and why they might be wrong (or right). Just as
fiction can be truer than the reality itself, so too can cultural theory be most accurate
when it's seemingly most paradoxical or simply wrong. The task of theory
is never to get the right answer, i.e. to issue summary, narrow
judgements based on some unquestioned orthodoxy, but to ask the
right questions. This means thinking through concepts, especially those we may
disagree with, thereby touching base with the historical material encoded in their
texts and concepts. Theory is the cultural version of freeware: you browse through
what others have done, and then create your own specific brainware.
What's all this theory have to do with practical political action? As Adorno put it, theory is the corrective on the tendency of praxis to devolve into narrow-minded dogmatism, while praxis is the corrective on theory's tendency to sink
into the trackless swamps of abstraction. One of the fundamental hallmarks of late capitalist ideology is the smug assertion that we live in a New Era, where history doesn't matter anymore. But when everything is completely new, then nothing really changes. The national wars and conflicts of the 19th century paved the way for the catastrophes of the 20th century; and while the Cold War inflicted terrible damage on the planet, it merely planned the thermonuclear extermination of the majority of the human race, while the global market forces are in the process of proletarianizing the entire planet and trashing the entire biosphere upon which all life depends. Theory transmits the collective memory of all this, of the terrible price humanity has paid for industrialization and global accumulation, and continues to pay, all across the planet. Only by learning from history does it earn the right to teach.
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