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theory aside From Theory Aside by Potts, Jason. DOI: 10.1215/9780822376637 Duke University Press, 2014. All rights reserved. From Theory Aside by Potts, Jason. DOI: 10.1215/9780822376637 Duke University Press, 2014. All rights reserved. theory aside jason potts and daniel stout, editors duke university press Durham and London 2014 From Theory Aside by Potts, Jason. DOI: 10.1215/9780822376637 Duke University Press, 2014. All rights reserved. © 2014 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-f ree paper ∞ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Quadraat and Quadratt Sans by Westchester Book Group Cover art: Rafael Reveron-Pojan, Piccolo-Paradiso, 2009. Rolled paper and thread, 95 × 20 × 16 cm. rafareve.blogspot.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Theory aside / edited by Jason Potts and Daniel Stout. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5670-7 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5681-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Criticism. 2. Literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. I. Potts, Jason, 1967– II. Stout, Daniel. pn81.t446 2014 801'.95—dc23 2013048708 From Theory Aside by Potts, Jason. DOI: 10.1215/9780822376637 Duke University Press, 2014. All rights reserved. contents introduction On the Side: Allocations of Attention in the Theoretical Moment | Jason Potts and Daniel Stout, 1 part i Chronologies Aside 1. Writing the History of Homophobia | Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 29 2. Late Exercises in Minimal Affi rmatives | Anne- Lise François, 34 3. Comparative Noncontemporaneities: C. L. R. James and Ernst Bloch | Natalie Melas, 56 4. On Suicide, and Other Forms of Social Extinguishment | Elizabeth A. Povinelli, 78 part ii Approaches Aside 5. What Is Historical Poetics? | Simon Jarvis, 97 6. The Biopolitics of Recognition: Making Female Subjects of Globalization | Pheng Cheah, 117 7. Before Racial Construction | Irene Tucker, 143 8. Archive Favor: African American Literature before and aft er Theory | Jordan Alexander Stein, 160 9. What Cinema Wasn’t: Animating Film Theory’s Double Blind Spot | Karen Beckman, 177 From Theory Aside by Potts, Jason. DOI: 10.1215/9780822376637 Duke University Press, 2014. All rights reserved. part iii Figures Aside 10. Hyperbolic Discounting and Intertemporal Bargaining | William Flesch, 199 11. The Primacy of Sensation: Psychophysics, Phenomenology, Whitehead | Mark B. N. Hansen, 218 12. Reading the Social: Erving Goff man and Sexuality Studies | Heather Love, 237 13. Our I. A. Richards Moment: The Machine and Its Adjustments | Frances Ferguson, 261 14. Needing to Know (:) Theory / Aft erwords | Ian Balfour, 280 bibliography | 287 contributors | 299 index | 303 vi Contents From Theory Aside by Potts, Jason. DOI: 10.1215/9780822376637 Duke University Press, 2014. All rights reserved. ac know ledg ments This volume had the support of our home institutions, St. Francis Xavier University and the University of Mississippi, but it would have been impos- sible without the assistance of a number of people we are glad to have the chance to thank publicly. We are particularly grateful to Frances Ferguson, who backed this project from its inception and provided assistance in count- less ways over the course of its production. Frances is awesome. Neil Hertz and Jonathan Arac were also early boosters, and we appreciate their support. Courtney Berger has been terrifi c to work with. We would like to thank her and Duke University Press’s two anonymous readers for their many helpful com- ments and suggestions. We’d also like to thank: Jessica Ryan for seeing the manuscript through DUP’s editorial process; Amy Buchanan for her art de- sign; and Mark Mastromarino for indexing the collection. We are very grateful to Hal Sedgwick and Jonathan Goldberg for allowing us to include a previously unpublished essay by Eve K osofsky Sedgwick; we are honored to have it as part of this collection and a ppreciate the work they did in locating it in her archive. We would also like to thank our many friends and teachers for their encourage- ment and engagement. Katie Arthur and Cristie Ellis patiently put up with us throughout this proc ess and generously allowed us to benefi t from their bright- minded insights at many turns. This volume is dedicated to our parents, John and Lora Stout and Pat and John Potts, for their unfl agging support and for encouraging us to think other- wise, even when it was clear it almost assuredly wasn’t going to pay. From Theory Aside by Potts, Jason. DOI: 10.1215/9780822376637 Duke University Press, 2014. All rights reserved. From Theory Aside by Potts, Jason. DOI: 10.1215/9780822376637 Duke University Press, 2014. All rights reserved. introduction On the Side: Allocations of Attention in the Theoretical Moment Jason Potts and Daniel Stout There is a moment in Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge’s introduction to their important 2011 collection Theory Aft er ‘Theory’ to which we are deeply sympa- thetic. In the sixth paragraph of that essay, the editors decry cultural theory’s “tendency to draw obsessively on the work of certain oracular fi gures.” Sug- gesting that such fi gures are not a “necessary or consensual feature of the project of theory in the fi rst place,” they off er a version of theory capable of operating with a less static canon and no longer subject to the centralizing force of any narrow band of theorists.1 Such an open- ended prospect is, of course, almost intuitively appealing. It would be hard not to choose intel- lectual fl exibility and diversity over the static monumentality of a few defi n- ing fi gures. Who would want fewer options? On some level, though, it must seem ironic that such a plea would need to be made at all, given the role that many theoretical approaches played in ex- panding the terrain of humanistic inquiry and fostering new connections across fi elds of research. There can be little dispute, anyway, that undergrad- uate and graduate students are now able to take seriously a host of topics and lines of inquiry that, even twenty years ago, would have seemed more or less impossible, or that this expansion has been in some signifi cant part cultural theory’s doing. Having underwritten the decanonization of the humanities by fostering a new and more rigorous self- consciousness about our operat- ing assumptions, disciplinary categories, and institutional practices, it’s noteworthy that cultural theory should itself now need to be freed from its obligations to the oracular gravity of a leading name. But the easy irony h ere, that the theory that began by knocking down methodological orthodoxies should itself remain beholden to what one critic calls “master thinkers,” is in fact only apparent.2 The place of the proper name within the operations of cultural theory is, from our perspec- tive, not so much a failure of self-c onsciousness—not a puzzling exception From Theory Aside by Potts, Jason. DOI: 10.1215/9780822376637 Duke University Press, 2014. All rights reserved.
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