Bill Bartlett wrote:
> A better sporting comparison with reading Butler would be watching a
> cricket match. Which many people say is about as interesting and
> pointless as watching grass grow. Player goes out, smacks a ball back
> and forward, runs back and forward endlessly for hours, occasionally
> running back and forward to score (but not necessarily having to
> actually run to score. This goes on for days, sometimes without all of
> the players even getting a bat. Preposterous, a bit like a fox-hunt
> without any fox, another game invented by the poms. Like Butler, a
> cricket match goes on and on and on, for days, often without any
> result at the end. And professional cricket players are also usually
> pompous wankers.
Getting back to "Theory" -- it's really very simple.
1. Theory has been around since forever. Aristotle's "Poetics" is theory. Philosophy is theory. etc.
2. In the aftermath of 68 there was some interesting verbiage emerging in France about especially power relations and how these affect perception, self-perception, etc.
3. In the mid seventies, there was a glut of Ph.D's (all formed by the graduate boom of the don't draft me era). The ratio of applicants to jobs grew each year. By the mid eighties, it was around 500 to 1. That wasn't for the Yale jobs; that was for the East Jesus U jobs.
4. Theory then became a final hoop for everyone to jump through. Mastering that language proved that you were smart and that you were cutting edge but not particularly interested in talking to workers. It was the Latin of the last generation.
Joanna 4.