Anti-theory and "formalism" (pensée[s en] arrière)

I've been observing a distaste for anything "theory"-related in literature departments lately--not so much among faculty as among students and soon-to-be faculty. People complain that theory lacks rigor and isn't really reading. They then say that, instead of theory, formalism or reading for form should be the task of the literary critic. Unfortunately, I see many of these people within studies of the texts of the English Early Modern period--this could be due to the fact that the canon (and I speak here only of the canon, of course) of English Early Modern literature has less formal disparity (no novels or much prose fiction in general--mostly epic, lyric, or dramatic poetry), and has been the main site of opposition to theory via historicism for the past few years.
Regardless of where it takes place, I find this claim very disturbing: not because formalism is bad, but because of the lack of understanding of formalism in it. Formalism is theory also--it is a mode of looking at a text based on certain presuppositions about the functioning of a text that can be articulated through philosophical/historical concerns. Just because it engages what Susan Wolfson wonderfully calls "the fragile facticity of form," (in the great article "Reading for Form" in MLQ 61.1, 2000) doesn't mean that it excludes these presuppositions and constitutes the meaning of the text on the basis of them. To think that it does would be a misunderstanding of facticity as fact: facticity is a mode of the being of the text that means it is given up for interpretation in a particular way, a way that can change and a way that can relate and must relate to larger concerns. In other words, the text exceeds the fact of its own existence in its facticity, in its being-factical. Thus formalism works with theory and is a part of it. Formalism is not anti-theory.
But even this interpretation of the claim is too generous. For what is really happening when "formalism" (one has to put it in quotes--because now we understand this "anti-theory" isn't actual formalism) gets invoked by these people is that the concerns of the marginalized get deliberately overlooked. This invocation takes place when a feminist remark comes up, or when a post-colonial comment is uttered: the "formalist" sees these as "theory" and thus irrelevant to the main issue--the text and its workings. "Formalism" (mis)understood by this person (along with "theory"--of course there can be a postcolonial reading without theory!) then becomes the aegis of his disgusting discrimination--and no doubt (this is why I use "his," here) many of those who I have seen invoke this "formalism" are white and male.
These people are doing a disservice to formalism and reading for form while also making "theory" all the more important, in my view: theory is the accounting for the expansion of a text through its formal logic and movement into and out of history via philosophy and cultural criticism. As such, formalism cannot in itself work against it--if one wanted to oppose theory, they would have to use formalism in a particular way. Rightly understood, though, formalism is a wonderful way of looking at texts. It is a shame that those that are just simply tired of concerning themselves and their reading with certain discouses, rather than getting excited and called into even deeper thought by the presence of these discourses--it is sad that these tired thinkers have taken over the term in this way, wanting only to think back to a thinking that is backwards, to a "formalism" that never existed.