Footnote to "bad theory"

Bad and good are probably the worst ways to characterize anything, and I tried to mess with this binary a bit in my post by introducing a (somewhat antiquated and Nietzschian) notion of health: bad theory was rotten, spoiled, or ready to fall off and decompose. Since bad theory though would rail against any binary whatsoever, though, rather than (like Derrida) see the limits of its usefulness (and assert that doing the former is precisely the same thing as the latter), I don't mind this as much (or its attendant organicism). That said, a lot of good theory was present already in this post on bad theory--present in the form of alternatives, really, each of which may eventually crystallize into a second term, but are never destined to do so, marked from the beginning for that particular fate (i.e. their crystallization needs to be produced). So it's not necessary, then, to go any further and cordon off what should remain area of possibility in another, separate post on good theory.

If the generation of such alternatives can itself be seen as a characteristic of good theory--for essentially I was saying that all good theory works on the level of paragraphs (keeping itself open to more and different theory by opening itself up to a political context, transcoding and somehow even co-interpreting through the finitude of any one theory's usefulness), rather than on the level of the essay or book as a whole--if this is the case, we might end up accomplishing precisely that dreaded compartmentalization or marking.

It is best then to remain ambivalent, and say that the approach might also produce regressions or outright refusals to listen to theory and what it has to say about the immense importance of decentering and remaining open to and fractured by multiplicity and otherness. Not too long ago much thought was indeed humanist, and while humanism perhaps too quickly became a bogeyman, upon realizing this we are all too quick to embrace him again under the aegis of so many self-proclaimed post-postmodern notions--now branded as weird, complex, problematic, locally effective, heterotopic in order to retain exactly enough of that of postmodern schizophrenia necessary to make the latter's lesson seem integrated or absorbed. This is merely to say that historicizing theory is more necessary than ever--and is to be accomplished less and less by way of linking theory quickly to all sorts of historicist microfacts and documents on the one hand (what Jameson a couple years ago said was precisely "how not to historicize theory,") and on the other by registering what certain notions did to advance previous thought through the destruction of its more unsavory commitments (which is what the Heideggerian and Derridian periodizing--or perhaps the emphasis needs to be put more strenuously now the other way around--ends up doing, or perhaps the more philosophical attempts at historicizing in general).