• Watershed

  • About

  • Contributors

  • Humanities on the Edge

  • Unfiltered Podcast

  • Contact

  • More

    Some Knotted Thoughts on Theory

    September 29, 2015

    |

    Aubrey Streit Krug

    ​

     

    1. When I was an undergraduate student in an American literature survey class, I wrote an essay on Susan Glaspbell’s one-act play Trifles (1916). The play’s main characters--several men, including a sherriff and an attorney, and two women, a neighbor and the sherriff's wife--are investigating the home of a woman whose husband has been found dead. What interested me, and what I tried to analyze, was the word play the two women engage in as they interpret the domestic scene; in particular, there’s a great play on the word “knot” as they discuss the absent woman’s quilting choices.

     

    My professor returned my essay draft to me with a copy of Derrida’s “Différance.” I hadn’t taken the required literary theory class yet, and I’d never heard of Derrida, so I simply tried to read it as assigned. I didn’t comprehend the text, but I don’t remember being put off by it, either. As with a lot of reading assignments, I felt a kind of detached curiosity: what was this thing? Eventually I went to have a talk with my professor. I ended up with a revised essay in which I spent the first two pages trying to summarize “Différance.” I think I got a B or B+, a grade I wasn’t proud of but which I thought was probably fair. When my professor explained the grade with the comment that he didn’t know how the beginning of the essay contributed to the argument I was building, I remember thinking that I didn’t know, either.

     

    2.
    That is a story I tell myself (and now you) when I think about theory, or when I try to think about how I met theory in literature. And it’s not meant as a cautionary tale for teachers; more likely, it’s a way for me to reflect on what I’m doing now as a student, in a graduate program. In this sense the story becomes about the difference between what I thought I was trying to learn and what I was learning about trying to think.

     

    In other words, anything it means is still in word play. I can’t confidently explain deconstruction, but I can try to do it with sentences:

     

    So can theory be just a kind of writing? Or if writing is recorded thinking with words, is theory just a style of thinking? Is theory the asking of the question? Why or why not?

     

    (If I answered, “yes, both,” would that be deconstruction? Please respond in the form of complete sentences.)

     

    3.
    Not surprisingly, given its title, apparently insignificant things become important in Glaspbell’s Trifles. Women’s skill in making material crafts is also their skill in symbolic communication. Unbeknownst to the men in the play, the textile is a text which is able to be written and read by those women in the know. And while there’s word play, in the imaginative world of the one-act, this isn’t a game without real stakes. Someone is dead and someone is accused. Questions of evidence and justice are asked, and someone needs to answer them. Verbal silence and indirect speech--which are usually taken as avoidance, as deferral, as impermanent--might be the best or only answers. Or they might be Glaspbell’s way of undermining her authority over the text and textile, shifting the questions of evidence and justice to the people in her original audiences in theatres nearly a century ago, or more recently to her readers and our discussions in classrooms.

     

    If I were still an undergraduate student in an American literature survey class, trying to write an essay about the play, this is where I’d need to start bringing in some textual evidence to support my interpretive claims. This is where I would need to research other scholars’ work (spoiler: I would find out that I’m not the first to read the text like this) and theorize the deconstructive lens through which I was trying to see the text in a new way. I would need to cite Derrida and apply, rather than append, “Différance” to Trifles.

     

    4.
    Theory should be more than a supplement to the real thing, to literature and writing: agree or disagree? Or do you question the premise of the question?

     

    I think it might be useful (albeit strenuous) to think about theory in the context of what Judith Butler calls “citational politics.” And I think about Sara Ahmed, who recently posted, “Theory = what you are doing if you cite (those known as) theorists who cite (those known as) theorists” (original tweet) and “We need to bring 'theory' back to life” (original tweet). Which theory died, and which should live again?

     

    I think about Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith’s 2014 collection Theorizing Native Studies; in the introduction, they deconstruct dichotomies between theory and truth, theory and community, and theory and practice. They trace an ongoing question of whose theory is validated as theoretical, and who does the validating. Who produces theory? Who and what is theory produced about? Who consumes theory? Who cites it? When, where, why?

     

    I think about Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux’s The Theory Toolbox (2003, 2011), a book written for students, in which theory, among other things, might be just “asking reflexive questions about how things work and how they might work differently” (page 4 in the first edition). Just theory.

     

    I think about phrases I’ve seen used to critique writing and projects of analysis: under theorized, over theorized. As if theory were making wagers in a game of gambling, as if theory was a performative act that needed to hit a certain style or mark: not too high, not too low. Just right. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe not.

     

    -Aubrey Streit Krug

     


     

    Tags:

    aubrey streit krug

    difference

    Please reload

    Featured Posts

    HotE Review: Charlotte Biltekoff’s “Real Food / Real Facts: Truth, Politics, and Power in the U.S. Food and Information Landscape”

    April 23, 2019

    Humanities on the Edge Preview: Kirsten Pai Buick

    April 12, 2017

    HotE Review: Annie McClanahan's “Tipwork, Microwork, Automation: The Insecurity of 21st C. Labor”

    September 10, 2019

    1/10
    Please reload

    Recent Posts

    Between Politics and Pop Culture: Watershed Takes on Fall 2019

    November 26, 2019

    The Art of the Historemix

    November 19, 2019

    On the Media and the Crowd

    November 19, 2019

    Queer Intimacy, Queer Art: Impressions from James Lowell Brunton's "Opera on TV"

    November 8, 2019

    HoTE Review: Claire Colebrook's "What Would You Do (And Who Would You Kill) in Order to Save the World?: Post-Apocalyptic Cinema and Extincti...

    November 6, 2019

    Humanities on the Edge Preview: Claire Colebrook

    October 29, 2019

    Patriarchy, Virginity, and Reclamation in Hocus Pocus

    October 22, 2019

    Don't Make Me Choose, Please: Labor Exclusive of the Body or the Mind (?)

    October 22, 2019

    Netflix's Queer Eye and Disability Representation

    October 15, 2019

    Tucker Carlson, John Bolton, North Korea, and the Politics of “Killing People”

    October 8, 2019

    Please reload

    Search By Tags

    1968

    19th century

    Affect Theory

    African American History

    Andi Zeisler

    Ann Cahill

    Anne Johnson

    Annie McClanahan

    Barthes

    Bernard Stiegler

    Black Lives Matter

    Bruno Latour

    Christy Hyman

    Claire Colebrook

    Colten White

    Deep Sea

    Deleuze

    Dewey

    Edith Wyschogrod

    Elias Canetti

    Epistemology

    Ferguson

    Frankenstein

    Freire

    Freud

    Futurity

    Gina Keplinger

    Giorgio Agamben

    Hong Kong

    HotE

    Humanities on the Edge

    Ilana Masad

    Jaclyn Swiderski

    Jean-Francois Lyotard

    Jeffrey Nealon

    Jessica Masterson

    John Blassingame

    John Durham Peters

    Jonathan Carter

    João Moreira Salles

    Judith Butler

    Kant

    Kirsten Pai Buick

    Lacan

    Legal Studies

    Linda J. Pawlenty

    Materialism

    Matthew Guzman

    Michel Foucault

    Milton S F Curry

    Moses Grandy

    Necropolitics

    Networks

    No Intenso Agora

    Ontology

    Peter Szendy

    Podcast

    Posthuman

    Queer Eye

    Queer Theory

    Queerness

    Review

    Rosi Braidotti

    Roxane Gay

    Ryan Skinnell

    S-Town

    Sandoval

    Slavoj Zizek

    Social Media

    Sonya Renee Taylor

    Sovereignty

    Stacy Alaimo

    State of Exception

    Steven Shaviro

    Tim Dean

    Tom Bennitt

    Toxicity

    Ulrich B. Phillips

    Viktor Turner

    Walter Benjamin

    activism

    adam hubrig

    agonism

    alicia garza

    alternative discourse communities

    anne nagel

    architectural theory

    aristotle

    art

    art and activism

    asceticism

    aubrey streit krug

    autism

    automation

    avant-garde

    bachelard

    bakhtin

    bentham

    big bluestem

    biopower/biopolitics

    blood draw

    bodies

    body

    bourdieu

    bridget r. cooks

    caitlin henry

    cameron steele

    canon

    capitalism

    cats

    celebrity

    cemeteries

    chandler warren

    chantal mouffe

    christian rush

    chronic illness

    classical philosophy

    colin kaepernick

    college football

    colten white

    composition

    construction

    control society

    corrections

    creative writing

    crisis

    critical animal studies

    critical theory

    dan froid

    dan uden

    daniel clausen

    david henson

    death event

    death-world

    debra hawhee

    deconstruction

    demagoguery

    democracy

    derrida

    desire

    dialectic

    difference

    digital humanities

    digital media

    dillon rockrohr

    disability

    disturbance

    donald trump

    driving

    ecocriticism

    economic theory

    education

    edwardo rios

    election 2016

    emoji

    eternal return

    ethics

    ethnography

    fan-fiction

    fandom

    fanon

    fashion

    female empowerment

    femininity

    feminism

    feminist

    feminist repurposing

    feminist rhetorics

    femme

    fighting

    film

    fitness

    flight

    food

    food science

    foucault