The Academic Cult of “Theory”
There is something wonderfully impressive about the word "theory." A theory sounds considerably grander than an observation, an argument or even an explanation. Nobody wins academic prestige by announcing that he has looked carefully at some evidence and reached a sensible conclusion. Say instead that you have "theorised" the phenomenon, preferably through a theoretical framework whose name requires several hyphens, and suddenly you have become an intellectual.
Jeremy Black has recently attacked this obsession with theory in academic history, while Roger Kimball has taken up Black's argument to remind us that the disease is much older and considerably more widespread: links below. Theory swept through the humanities during the great postmodern decades of the 1980s and 1990s, bringing with it deconstruction, poststructuralism, social constructionism and an entire vocabulary through which relatively straightforward matters could be rendered magnificently obscure. It has returned with renewed force through decolonisation, critical race theory, gender theory and the various other theoretical industries that have colonised the softer regions of the modern university.
There is nothing inherently wrong with theory. Indeed, without theory there would scarcely be serious intellectual inquiry. Newtonian mechanics is theoretical. Evolutionary theory is theoretical. Quantum field theory is theoretical. A theory in this sense attempts to organise observations, explain relationships that would otherwise remain disconnected, generate predictions and expose itself to the possibility that experience will prove it wrong. The power of the theory comes precisely from its vulnerability. It risks something.
The trouble begins when disciplines borrow the prestige of theory without accepting its discipline. A physicist who proposes a theory that repeatedly predicts the wrong experimental result has a problem. An academic who theorises literature, race, gender, empire or social power can often accommodate virtually any conceivable observation. Evidence supporting the framework confirms the theory, while evidence contradicting it becomes evidence of how deeply concealed the phenomenon really is. The theory consequently acquires a remarkable property: nothing can count against it.
That should immediately make us suspicious. A conceptual system capable of explaining every possible state of affairs may explain nothing at all. If racism explains both discrimination and the absence of observable discrimination, patriarchy explains both female disadvantage and female advantage, colonialism explains both Western intervention and Western non-intervention, and capitalism explains both scarcity and abundance, we are no longer dealing with explanations in the ordinary sense. We have constructed intellectual machines into which every observation can be fed and from which the same conclusion invariably emerges.
Karl Popper made falsifiability famous as a demarcation criterion for science, although philosophers have spent decades qualifying and criticising his formulation. The underlying insight nevertheless remains powerful. Serious explanation must place some restrictions upon what we expect to observe. There must be conceivable circumstances under which we would say that our explanation has failed. A theory that survives because its advocates have defined failure out of existence has achieved invulnerability at the price of empirical content.
The soft academic disciplines have an additional temptation because their subject matter is extraordinarily complicated. Human beings are not electrons. Nations, families, wars, religions, economies, artistic movements and political revolutions are historically contingent phenomena produced by countless interacting causes. Precisely because these subjects are difficult, the temptation to impose a grand theoretical architecture upon them is enormous. Complexity becomes manageable once everything is understood as manifestations of class conflict, patriarchy, colonialism, discourse, power or whichever explanatory master key happens to be fashionable.
But perhaps history does not possess a master key. Perhaps sometimes Caesar crossed the Rubicon because Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and the historian's first responsibility is to establish what happened, why the participants believed they were doing it, what circumstances surrounded the event and what followed from it. Kimball makes essentially this point when discussing the proposition that historical truth is politically constructed. "Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C," is not made true by a theoretical framework or political commitment. It is true or false according to what occurred.
Black similarly defends the unfashionable proposition that historical statements can correspond, however imperfectly, to a historical reality. Historians have always known that evidence must be selected and interpreted. That banal observation does not entail the far more radical proposition that the past is therefore constructed by the historian. Napoleon existed before the historian wrote about Napoleon. The Battle of Waterloo had an outcome before anybody developed a theory of historical narrative. Interpretation operates upon facts; it does not manufacture them.
Much academic theorisation reverses that order. The framework arrives first and the evidence afterwards. The scholar already knows that the subject concerns power, race, gender, colonialism or oppression because those are the categories through which the research project has been designed. The resulting scholarship can resemble a detective novel in which the detective announces the murderer on page one and spends the remaining three hundred pages rearranging the clues until they agree.
There is also a sociological explanation for the theory fetish. Theory confers professional status. Simply reading Shakespeare closely, studying archival documents or describing an archaeological site, risks appearing insufficiently sophisticated. The scholar needs specialised knowledge inaccessible to ordinary readers, and theoretical vocabulary supplies it beautifully. An intelligent layperson may be able to understand a historical document, but introduce epistemic violence, hegemonic discourse, intersectional positionality and decolonial praxis and the professional's monopoly is restored.
This problem was noticed decades ago. Critics of the theoretical turn observed that literary scholars had increasingly transformed themselves into amateur philosophers and sociologists. The professionalisation of academic disciplines creates pressure to possess expertise unavailable to outsiders; simply helping people understand great books does not sufficiently establish such a monopoly. Theory provides the necessary esoteric equipment.
There is an almost economic incentive at work. If a field develops an impenetrable vocabulary, outsiders become dependent upon accredited interpreters. The professor who says that a novel depicts an unhappy marriage can be replaced by any perceptive reader. The professor who says that the same novel performs a subaltern destabilisation of heteronormative bourgeois subjectivity has erected considerably higher barriers to entry. Whether the second description tells us more about the novel is almost beside the institutional point.
Jargon consequently becomes confused with profundity. Yet difficult language is justified only when the subject itself requires difficult concepts. General relativity is difficult because spacetime geometry is difficult. Quantum mechanics cannot always be translated into ordinary language without losing mathematical precision. There is no corresponding reason why an argument about a nineteenth-century novel must be incomprehensible to an educated reader. Obscurity may sometimes indicate depth, but it can equally conceal the absence of it.
The problem becomes worse when theoretical sophistication is imposed administratively. Students are told that dissertations and theses require a "theoretical framework" regardless of whether the research question needs one. The framework becomes another box on the methodological form: literature review, research question, methodology, theoretical framework. A scholar who has discovered something interesting is consequently required to find a theorist whose vocabulary can be wrapped around the discovery before it qualifies as scholarship.
This practice has attracted criticism even within contemporary historical scholarship. A recent discussion concerning Nigerian historical research argued against requiring theoretical engagement as an automatic condition of serious work, proposing instead that it be encouraged when the particular research problem requires it. That modest principle should be revolutionary only in an academic culture that has forgotten what theory is for.
Theory should emerge because there is something that requires explanation. We observe a pattern, encounter an anomaly or discover that existing explanations cannot adequately account for the evidence. We then construct a hypothesis or conceptual framework and ask whether it makes better sense of the material. The evidence gives rise to the theoretical problem.
The theory fetish reverses the sequence. First choose the theory, then select the material to which it will be applied. A doctoral student can announce that she will conduct a Foucauldian analysis of eighteenth-century prisons before examining the prisons. Another can promise an intersectional analysis of Victorian literature before reading the novels. The intellectual destination has been entered into the navigation system before the car has left the driveway.
There is an even deeper philosophical difficulty. The great theories of the softer disciplines frequently expand far beyond the evidence from which they arose. Marxism began as, among other things, an ambitious theory of historical and economic development and became a universal interpretive mechanism. Freudian psychoanalysis transformed observations about psychological disturbance into an explanatory architecture encompassing dreams, childhood, sexuality, religion, civilisation and art. Poststructuralism expanded linguistic and philosophical arguments into claims about knowledge and society. The intellectual temptation is always the same: a tool that explains something is promoted into a theory that explains everything. At that point the theory ceases to serve thought and begins to govern it.
Kimball identifies the political consequence. Once truth itself is redescribed as socially constructed and knowledge becomes a manifestation of power, scholarship can be converted from an attempt to discover what is true into an instrument for achieving preferred political outcomes. If all scholarship is political anyway, there is supposedly no loss in making political commitment explicit. The historian becomes an activist, and interpretation becomes intervention.
But the argument contains its own trap. If all claims to truth are merely products of power, why should the theorist's claim about power escape the same diagnosis? If every historical narrative merely expresses political interests, then the radical historian's narrative does too. The theory saws through the branch on which the theorist is sitting.
There is nothing especially profound about discovering that observers have perspectives. Of course they do. Humans are finite creatures occupying particular locations in history and culture. We select evidence, make mistakes, inherit assumptions and approach problems with prior beliefs. The astonishing leap occurs when this ordinary epistemological humility is converted into the proposition that objective knowledge is therefore impossible. The fact that vision occurs from a perspective does not mean there is nothing to see.
Indeed, the theory fetish can produce the opposite of intellectual humility. The old empiricist at least knew that tomorrow's evidence might prove him wrong. The grand theorist already possesses the conceptual machinery through which tomorrow's evidence will be interpreted. Every archive becomes another demonstration of the theory. Every novel confirms the framework. Every social outcome reveals the underlying structure. The language of scepticism conceals extraordinary certainty.
The cure is not an anti-intellectual rejection of theory. It is the restoration of theory to its proper position as servant rather than master. Some questions require elaborate conceptual machinery. Others require archival work, measurement, careful description, comparison or simple logical analysis. Scholarship should use whatever tools illuminate the problem rather than forcing every problem through the currently prestigious tool.
Sometimes the most intellectually serious sentence an academic can write is simply: "The evidence does not support that conclusion." There would be a certain loss of grandeur. Entire paragraphs might become comprehensible. Historians might once again write books that intelligent people outside history departments could read. Literary scholars might occasionally discuss literature. Social scientists might discover observations their frameworks did not predict. Students might even be permitted to find something before being instructed what it theoretically means; that is, before brainwashing.
