CLT?

[Paul Mackin]

Terrance's post suggests many interesting ideas. It's a crime I think when
theory is allowed to tyrannize--it should always be subserviant to
practice. Just as knowledge should be subserviant to the world it
purports to describe. Or approached from the positive direction, as famous
psychologist Kurt Lewin remarked somewhere, there is nothing more
practical than a good theory.

The reason students of literature love having some kind of explicit 
theory must certainly be that it makes their criticism  less susceptible
to the  charge of personal idiosyncrasy and gut reaction. It allows their
research to be seen as more scientific, more objective--assuming, that is,
that the theory being followed can be made to enjoy some often hard to
define privilege over competing theories.

Keynes' statement about theories was in the context of economics, one of
the most practical of human endeavors. Classical theory (Adam Smith and
more modern laissez-faire-ists) was far more elegant than anything Keynes
could come up with--but it just didn't work in the face of world wide
stagnation and depression. So, does decontruction work in the face of
Thomas Pynchon? Or does Marism, or Freudianism, or Feminism?

It would be to reductionist (and wrong) to say that Postmodernism is the
theory of the end of theories, but it's an interesting statement
nevertheless. 

			P.

On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Terrance Flaherty wrote:
> 
> Just thinking this out, but doesn't theory always seeks to,
> in Nietzsche's terms,  "create the world in its own image"? 
> Kinda like philosophy, maybe?  Its tyranny is to transform
> all discussions into discussions of knowledge, even among
> those wishing to defend the autonomy and sovereignty of
> say,  politics (in Pynchon or elsewhere), which means that
> even list members  in search of the political, the
> religious, the poetic, in P's art may be seduced into a
> discussion of the foundations on which the criteria by which
> these topics are known is based. TRP is the turf of theory, 
> where the political critic, the religious critic and the
> p-lister  cannot but acquiesce to its mode of theory's
> argumentation,
> if not its actual substantive arguments. No, not right, I
> don't want
> to say that, but well I'm  still learning this stuff so....
> 
> Education, as Adams said goes on and on and
> although Lord Keynes might not agree, it  is the only
> investment immuned to the law of diminishing return.
>