Offering Theory. John Mowitt
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from intellectual heritage x be applied to objects from another?). These are not false problems, it is just that the power of their falsity is too limited to be especially generative. They make the “when or the where” of Theory seem less interesting than they might otherwise be by, in effect, folding a single when and a single where into what Theory is. Or, as is more often heard today, what Theory was.
This invocation of the grammatical distinction between the past and the present points to something that will matter in what follows. Hovering, like a “third ear,” above or behind the “when or where” of Theory is a proposition about context. More particularly, the question “when is Theory?” reads like a historical question, just as “where is Theory?” reads like a social or cultural question. History, society, culture are all ways to think what context designates in the protocols of critical analysis. That said, at issue here is not a banal “contextualization” of Theory (others have scorched this earth), and this for two reasons. First, what seems worth fussing over in the “when or where” of Theory is something more like its “occasion,” “event” or “performance,” where what is foregrounded is how what we might provisionally call “theoretical effects” arise, where the enunciation of Theory can be traced in the emergence of its statements or, in the jargon of application, its arguments, those pieces of prose exposition folks trained philosophically are adept at parsing (separating into parts).
Second, at risk in the labor of contextualization is the theoretical presupposition of context itself. To invoke a commonplace, context is typically compared and insistently contrasted with text, but is this really anything more than a gesture of convenience and thus a sign of intellectual impatience? Grasped in its historical materiality, that is, etymologically, “context” derives from Latin where it plainly says: weave (texere) with or together (con). Here the warp and the woof, the strands woven together and across, cannot be grasped as contrasting with one another in the way that text is now typically contrasted with context. In fact, if one has been paying attention, this weaving is precisely what text came to designate in the mo(ve)ment, now, with some justice, derided, as poststructuralism. Indeed, it is perhaps only within this derisive posturing that text is insistently deprived of this etymological force, a telling symptom of which is the proposition that texts are simply, strictly or merely linguistic phenomena. Although clearly not his cup of tea, text might also be another word for what Charles Sanders Peirce meant by a “general semiosis,” that is, the evolutionary process whereby being “cognizes” itself.
Thus, attention to the “when or where of Theory” must immediately be attention to the event, the occasion of this weaving, both in terms of the moment of its production and also in terms of its moment of reception or the moment of “theorization,” that is, when the species of writing and reading meet. Here, one might argue, the distinction between “close” and “distant” reading is especially unhelpful for it allows reading to avoid all of the political complications that arise in approaching a given “when or a where” from a different “when or where” even when this approach is from within a geographically or historically shared “when or where.” That said, and there will be more to be said about the logic of devotion, the “friends of the text” have proven to be their own worst enemies. Even scholars and critics who have been paying attention note with justifiable exasperation that the weaving one finds in much work inspired by the concept of the text is rather narrow-minded. That is, inclined to follow out only those threads that challenge and therefore satisfy a conception of reading bound by the protocols of a largely disciplinary literacy. As important as this radicalization of reading has been (and this is not in dispute), it has implicitly motivated this radicalization by setting certain threads aside, protecting textual reading from the even more profound radicalization that tracing “weaving with or together” (what Gayatri Spivak once called “textility”) might provoke. Thus, at the risk of “unfriending” the friends of the text, the chapters that follow will build toward the invention, perhaps “reinvention,” of a concept of context designed to help with this impasse. How do we read the weave? Not the text in terms of context, nor the context in terms of the text, but the weave.
This concept, that of “sociography,” will emerge in the course of a series of readings each seeking to attend to the “when or where” of Theory. Deliberately, these readings will engage rather familiar (and not only within Northern and Western discourses of the university) theoretical figures—Foucault, Kristeva, Derrida, Williams, Said, Lacan, Deleuze and so on—but with the express goal of brushing them against the grain. That is, reading them either in the setting of an occasion—an inaugural lecture, a staged debate/conversation, a graduate seminar—or at the level of enunciation, a form of attentiveness that will facilitate a transition from the musicality of theoretical procedures to musical performance as a site of theoretical articulation. In each case, the task of picking up these particular threads from “here” will prompt refection on Theory as an event, the offering of a reading, and drive the invention of “sociography,” that is, the means by which to figure the site of the “when or where” of Theory. Without this those working in the critical humanities and “interpretive” (previously, “qualitative”) social science are left to “situate” the objects of their attention against something outside them, a constraining or determining context that responsible, “properly” political scholarship typically speed-reads through the objects of its attention to reach. Again, the snarl of reading has for too long been confused with something like “literacy” and thus needs to be displaced onto the work of weaving with and together, a mode of “handling” that I am proposing to rename Theory. The “sociographic” is designed to facilitate this displacement.
But sociography is also designed to amplify the “or” that conjoins “where” and “when” in the question that animates this project. To amplify here means to sound simultaneously the inclusive and exclusive connotations of the conjunction, the effect of which is to stress that where and when are distinct, but in ways that when juxtaposed make them spatiotemporal renditions of each other. Sociography is pitched so as to encounter this problem, not as a limit but as a provocation. A provocation to what? On the right hand, it is a provocation to consider that humanistic inquiry as such might be committed to problem finding, to stumbling upon when or where Theory could and maybe even should be taking place (a matter taken up at greater length in the introduction that follows). But on the left, the sinister hand, sociography is a provocation to let Theory answer to the demands of those who, to stick with the trope of weaving with or together, work when or where weaving forms part of a world, a planet, in which a theorist is clothed, swaddled, embalmed or enshrouded. Sociography does not, therefore, traffic in either guilt or responsibility. It is not about the professional suicide that even a glimpse at this world or the next might tragically recommend. But nor is it about a practice of responsibility that forgets, in the instant of a ringtone, that response is an insidious ruse. Behind its ocean of zeroes and ones, digitalization makes certain digits count more than others. Some have the wherewithal of responding. It is not an unequivocal virtue.
Very little in what follows is settled. Faithful to its humanistic leanings, this inflammatory device is thrown forward seeking problems, not their solutions. The threads spun out here do not lead out of the labyrinth, they lead in; in where no monster waits to show itself, where no heroes hastily provision a quest the West cannot seem to get enough of.
Surely, now more needs to be said about the “when or where” of what precisely. My tedious recourse to capitalization, “Theory,” demands it.
As if implicitly demonstrating the principle that the event of decolonization takes place in both the colony and the metropole, the debate over Theory—largely, but not exclusively in the North and the West—has long assumed a necro-political tone. I myself have chimed in. Apart from a certain critique of Mbembe’s existential humanism, what seems called for now is less fussing over whether Theory is alive or dead—let’s just stipulate that its condition is “chronic”—and more careful consideration of its circumstances. Or, more precisely, how did its condition arise and with what implications for those of us who insist upon handling Theory?
Although Adorno’s