Table Of Contenttheory 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.
Description:Where can theory go now? Where other voices concern themselves with theory's life or death, the contributors to Theory Aside take up another possibility: that our theoretical prospects are better served worrying less about "what’s next?" and more about "what else?" Instead of looking for the next
