Theory [Snippets 11]

RELATED TERMS: Posthuman; Postmodernism; Poststructuralism; Structuralism; Theoretical Practice

What is the state and status of theory in the 2020s? For example, could it be argued that one can speak of a cycle, a story cycle, a twisted tale from which there is no escape, one that traces the turns and returns within an intergenerational inheritance that cannot be declined, the gift given to us, that speaks of, “untimely specters that one must not chase away but sort out, critique, keep close by, and allow to come back” (Derrida, 1994: 87).

Thus, do we inherit (American) cybernetics (of the 1940s-1960s) through (French) structuralism (of the 1950s-1960s), itself becoming (French) post-structuralism (of the 1960s-1970s), critically articulated to the work of the postwar Freudo-Marxist philosophes engagés, that returns as (American) postmodernism (of the 1980s-1990s), that proliferates into … ‘globalised-localised’, ‘internationalised’, ‘deterritorialised’ theory[-activism] or activism[-theory], in an ontological, practice and performative turn, but not a pragmatic turn. Theoretical moments become social movements, theoretical-activist-movements that articulate distinctive axio-epistemo-ontologies – modes of existence in which ‘we’ are constituted and partake, but not necessarily together or in a spirit of togetherness. To paraphrase Hayles (1999), while some of us became posthuman, others became nonhuman.

One implication of this proliferation is that the positionalities of such theoretical-activist-movements include not just those in the margins of dominant socio-cultural, socio-technical, socio-economic and socio-ecological formations, the liminalised, dis-valued and de-valued, but also those consigned to non-being and non-existence within those dominant formations, such as theorised in some strains of Black Studies. The marginalised-liminalised excluded may proceed through negation of the dominant order to gain acceptance, re-valuation and recognition – a process sometimes discussed in terms of ‘gaining rights’. However, the ontologically-existentially eliminated may only proceed through bringing an end to the processes of world-formation whereby the being-non-being distinction that sustains them in un-recognisable, non-existent, non-being are enacted. At the same time, the complexities of ‘ending’, of never being able to fully ‘overcome’ or ‘transcend’ such a legacy, are woven through these lineages of thought.

Within the Afropessimism, for example, the non-existent non-being, who endures the landless inhabitation of selfless existence (Sexton), occupies a realm of social death or worldlessness (Patterson, Wilderson, Hartman, Sharpe, Sexton, Warren) and a complex ontological status as that which enables the existence of that which ‘is’ and that which ‘is not’ at the same time, sometimes expressed as para-ontology (Chandler, Moten), although with different implications, and thereby condemns itself to perpetuated, objectivised, non-existent non-being. As noted by Vegso (2020) this kind of worldlessness challenges the core assumptions of phenomenology concerning being, appearance, meaning and world in the context of Kantian, Husserlian and Heideggerian – and countless other – phenomenologies.

This distinction, between marginalisation and elimination (annihilation or extermination), is not a question of surface versus depth or appearance versus non-appearance but rather one of intensity of attention to what is ‘there’, even to the nothingness – that is not ‘nothing’ – that is ‘there’, in its disappearing appearance or fugitivity. In this characterisation, to paraphrase Nathan Snaza (2023: 259), what is at stake in literary analysis, social analysis and, of relevance here, design analysis, are economies of attention, not ‘methods’. Snaza cites Ashley Barnwell (2020) who argues that, in the context of discussing ‘method’, what is at issue are ways of thinking and writing – and acting – that best capture the emotional (or do we mean ‘affective’) complexity of social life.

It is, then, a question ‘attending’: ‘who’ attends to ‘what’; what is framed as ‘who’; ‘who’ is framed as ‘what’; and how deterministic, or how enduring, are such processes of framing? This does not just concern questions of ‘what there is’ (ontology or onto-epistemology – something rather than nothing), ‘what is there’ (phenomenology – appearances, evidences, intentionalities) and what appears to be perceptibly valued (axiology – values, worth, hierarchies). This question of ‘attending’ encompasses the difficulty of attention to the (apparently non-apparent) ‘weight’ (pressure or atmosphere or ‘feeling’) of histories that are embodied and embedded in the field of potential ‘attentivity’, of that which comes to attention, of its own ‘volition’, so to speak, and that which brings itself to attend to that which comes to attention (Slaby, 2020), a paradox of non-original origin, a paradox of ‘being’ – ‘there’ (the one for the other).

Further Reading

Barnwell, A. (2020) Critical affect: The Politics of method. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.

Derrida, J. (1994) Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the New International. New York, NY: Routledge.

Geoghegan, B. D. (2023) Learning to code: cybernetics and French Theory, in Code: from information theory to French theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 133–168.

Hayles, N. K. (1999) How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Heims, S. J. (1989) Introduction, in Norbert Wiener, The Human use of human beings: cybernetics and society. 2nd ed. London, UK: Free Association Books, pp. xi–xxiii.

Lafontaine, C. (2007) The Cybernetic Matrix of “French Theory”, Theory, Culture & Society, 24(5), pp. 27–46. doi: 10.1177/0263276407084637.

Liu, L. H. (2010) The cybernetic unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French theory, Critical Inquiry, 36(2), pp. 288–320. doi: 10.1086/648527.

Mirowski, P. (2012) Minding the cybernetic gap: Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain, Technology and Culture, 53(1), pp. 192–195. Available at: http://www.techculture.org/2012_jan/etc_mirowski.html (Accessed: 24 November 2013).

Slaby, J. (2020) The Weight of history: from Heidegger to Afro-Pessimism’, in Guidi, L. and Rentsch, T. (eds) Phenomenology as performative exercise. Leiden, NL: Brill, pp. 173–195.

Snaza, N. (2023) Why this? Affective pedagogy in the Wake, in The Affect theory reader 2: Worldings, tensions, futures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 255–272.

Wiener, N. (1989) The Human use of human beings: cybernetics and society. With a new Introduction by Steve J. Heims. 2nd ed. London, UK: Free Association Books.