'So long as thought does not relinquish its claim to a place in the traditions of a particular people, its claim to found an anthropology other than as estimation, an evaluation, a judgement! remains dubious and will not bear scrutiny. It is in this sense that an identity in thought, rather than a tradition of thought marks a radical departure' - Rabdinra Ray, Analytical reason and the project of a philosophical anthropology'
'Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.' - Kafka, Before the law
Theory displaces the familiar. It interrupts what feels obvious. It names structures that common sense prefers to naturalize. In After Theory, Terry Eagleton reminds us that theory did not arise to decorate prose but to confront power, suffering, embodiment, belief, and violence with conceptual seriousness. Theory becomes indispensable precisely where experience is thickest and the least nameable. The world one is describing is already structured by invisible abstractions—law, capital, sovereignty, stigma, topology, time. Theory is not a verbal pirouette; it is the instrument that allows the unsaid to become visible.
The academic practice of dismissing an opponent’s work as “terminology” while praising one’s own circle has several names. Pierre Bourdieu would call it symbolic violence within a field. In more polemical registers it is epistemic gatekeeping. The move is not about clarity; it is about jurisdiction—who has the right to theorize.
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Who is the anti-theorist? I find the person who argues that there is something like a pure empirical knowledge outside of a discourse and discursive settings. On the other hand within academia there has over the last 10 years been a massive onslaught of a fascisitc rejection of theory as 'jargon'. Such attempts will inevitably favour what the person themselves works on as 'jargon' and the other person's praxis and theory as bullshit. I would argue that the problem in academia is not terminology but a lack of serious engagement and debate. Most academic conferences today end with a very palatable agreement, anything else is out of the ordinary and usually suveilled and punished. The hard academic practice of asking difficult questions has been replaced with name calling or total submission to a network.
But we have to take this even more seriously. What is knowledge produced under the specific conditions that only your own 'identity' that is your artistic, academic or activist production is tied to the links you have in a network? This is a very specific form of knowledge that we can simply proscribe without too much formality as 'networked' knowledge. Such networks are less like networks and more like minor epistemic formations. They work with through the basic formula of fascism: normalcy. Certain theoritical practices are normalized: which today centre primarily around generating gossip and spending most of the day speculating on who fits under what specific title: theory master, hardcore work etc. It is amazing how hard it is today to stand with an academic and actually talk about academics. Most conversations are like a police procedural where peoples are profiled and labelled.
Howev this is exactly what we are left with in academics: networked knowledge. Academics has taken on the tendencies of any pop-culture industry with super stars and constant talk about immediate transformation of politics. Most conversations around academics sound not very far from some sort of pledge drive with a bunch of musicians atonally mimicing the lyrics from 'We can save the world'. I'm sure thats a real song too.
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Rabdinra Ray, a much celebrated academic figure from Sociology who's work is almost never discussed commented in his marvelous book 'Philosophical Anthropology' that thinking could cannot be confined by traditions (leave alone by the strange progeny of academic tradition, the network). He argued for 'Thinking for the pleasure of doing so and not for its utilitarian adequacy'. As academics we are not moral teachers, who are here to create cults that imbricate thinking but to encourage the practice of thought itself. But this is the manner of networked thinking.
This is what Rabindra Ray also described as traditionalist thought, which he marked as not being thought at all. Ray's highest aim was 'the freedom of thought' which he saw as being under threat from traditionalism, and I concur wholeheartedly with this:
'The freedom of thought may become a historical issue for a generation grown unused to, tired of and hostile to thinking'
Irrespective of the spectrum of thought one comes from, I find these ideas and convictions of Ray the very grounds of thought itself, without this we have very little to cling on to in the current political scenario.
Does this mean that we abandon empirical work? No but we subject empirical work to extensive scrutiny, via deep and complex ideas, and we recognize collectively that the argument that life today or at any time, is 'life as always' is the very core of a conservative ideology. Of course it is always more convenient to protect the homeostasis of one's own social beliefs, but why not actually give new, innovative thought a chance. It may not always look like what you think thought should look like, but that overemphasis on aesthetics and form as a the ground for soundness is just completely cynical and nihilisitc. And nothing is more dangerous to a liberatory model of life than normalized cynicism.
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