Abstract Drawing on nearly a decade of research, this essay investigates the hatred of theory on the political right. The phobic fascination with theory is over a century old. Yet, in recent years, it has taken on a new importance, with several figures assuming powerful roles in and around the U. S. government having made their names by attacking the Frankfurt School, French post-structuralism, critical race theory, and the ontologically dubious phenomenon known as “cultural Marxism.” Theories of affective and libidinal economy can help explain how passionate feelings came to be attached to the “sticky” signifier “theory” despite its being an abstraction about abstractions—a potent object of collective hatred that consolidates political communities through performative rejection and online “hate-sharing.” Indeed, the author situates anti-theory discourse within longer histories of antisemitic conspiracy narratives, Cold War culture wars, and late twentieth-century attacks on “political correctness” and describes her personal experience of receiving hate mail accusing her of participating in a plot to destroy Western Civilization. But a full explanation of the phenomenon also requires an account of the role of media fragmentation in promoting it. The affordances of search platforms, which facilitate the rapid conquest of new or unusual keywords, and of social media, which incentivize rituals of performative rejection by conferring influence on users who engage in them, have played an important role in making the hatred of theory mainstream. At the current juncture, with new political alliances uniting against higher education and in favor of rapid AI development, privatization, and the dismantling of the professional-managerial class, the hatred of theory threatens not only to reshape universities ideologically but to replace them with a data-driven “machine empiricism.”
Moira Weigel (Thu,) studied this question.