"The critical and momentous shift:" theory, resistance

Diana Fuss in a recent article, "Teaching Theory" (in The Minnesota Review, 71-2). She talks of Paul de Man's "The Resistance to Theory:" how for de Man theory is resistance--both to other theories and to its own possibility (it is a practice raising questions about itself, resisting itself)--and how the resistance to theory (rejecting it) is itself theory. In short, as she affirms from experience teaching theory to students, "the best way to lessen students' immediate opposition to theory was to show how their concerns were themselves resolutely theoretical" (180). Thus, "ironically, de Man became useful as a strategy to mitigate student resistances rather than to cultivate them." ...a sentence, I'll note, that says more accurately what people I think are saying when they talk about the "failures of theory." She continues, "De Man's 'The Resistance to Theory' became the most effective weapon in my own theoretical arsenal for resisting the students' resistances" (181). And this leads her to what I think is an important passage, outlining a future for theory--one that overcomes, by acknowledging and learning from, the "failures" of theory:

There is no question that de Man was onto something. The best I have read, taught, and perhaps have written over the years is theory unafraid to resist itself, to challenge its own assumptions. Yet, my thoughts on how to theorize have changed dramatically since I became a professor, largely because of my experience teaching theory to undergraduate and graduate students. I no longer think that resistance exhausts all the many possibilities and practices of theory. If I have a new theory of theory, it is far less resistance and much more persistence. My new credo, forged in the crucible of the classroom, sees invention where I once saw only subversion. It embraces theorization over theory, an intellectual labor that goes beyond uncovering and resisting dangerous old ideas in favor of venturing and testing responsible new ones. (181)

"While resistance makes good politics, it does not always make effective pedagogy," she continues, and perhaps gets in the way of what, theoretically, needs to happen most: "Every theory classroom needs eventually to make the critical and momentous shift from talking about theory to finally doing it; only then, in my experience, does theory really begin to happen" (181).