These are the slides from a talk I gave to a group of PhD students form Cardiff, Bristol, Bath and Exeter Universities on using social theory in research.

1. Against ‘theory’
Des Fitzgerald
School of Social Sciences
Cardiff University
fitzgeraldp@cardiff.ac.uk
@des_fitzgerald

3. There wasn't
always such
a thing as
‘social
theory.’
However, I associate the popularisation, if not
coinage, of ‘social theory’ in its current usage with
Anthony Giddens, who (I think) first dubbed Habermas
a ‘social theorist’ because of the way he straddled
philosophy and sociology, especially after The Theory
of Communicative Action.
Of course, most of what is now called ‘social theory’
has this character too, but it also has another, less
admirable feature: scholasticism. Habermas’ magnum
opus is basically a replay of what Talcott Parsons did
in The Structure of Social Action and which Giddens
would do throughout the 1980-90s in his
‘structuration’ period. All these works basically
construct social theory by a ‘syncretistic’ reading of a
few so-called classic texts.
Fuller, S. (2017) ‘Steve Fuller’s Guide for Teaching Social Theory’
http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/19119

4. When we teach social theory, we ‘organize
the course around a set of “master
theorists”, each of whom is presented as
possessing a coherent world-view, the
mastery of which will partially unlock the
secrets of the social universe. In that case,
The Grand Prize for the student is to mix and
match these world-views in a way to opens
up new insights… [This] simply mystifies the
so-called master theorists, turning them into
celebrities, the secular equivalent of saints.’
Fuller, S. (2017) ‘Steve Fuller’s Guide for Teaching
Social Theory’
http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/19119
Doing social,
theory has
since become
a kind of
game, or a
performance

5. By saying that I am against theory I am
trying to:
● Not reify ‘theory.’
● Distance myself (and you!) from the
theory industry.
● Think critically about the literature
that calls itself ‘theory’ (and how
white it is! and how male it is!).
● Call a lot of theoretical work what is
is: scholasticism.
● Steer you gently away from ‘the
theory chapter.’
● Think about other - less elevated -
ways of achieving the work of theory.

6. Read texts, not theories

7. ‘Within the academy, the
word theory has a lot of
capital. I have always been
interested in how the word
theory itself is distributed;
home some materials are
understood as theory and
not others….as a student of
theory, I learned that theory
is used to refer to a rather
narrow body of work’
(Ahmed, 2017: 8)
Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

8. ‘I am relatively comfortable in
critical theory, I do not deposit my
hope there, nor do I think this is a
difficult place to be: if anything, I
think it is easier to do more abstract
and general theoretical work… The
empirical work, the world that
exists, is for me where the
difficulties and thus the challenges
reside.’
(Ahmed, 2017: 9)

9. ‘Reading black feminist and feminist of color scholarship was life
changing; I began to appreciate that theory can do more the
closer it gets to the skin. I decided then: theoretical work that is
in touch with a world is the kind of theoretical work I wanted to
do. Even when I have written texts organized around the history
of ideas, I wanted to write from my own experiences...the
personal is theoretical.’
‘Theory itself is often assumed to be abstract… to abstract is to
drag away, detach, pull away, or divert. We might then have to
drag theory back, to bring theory back to life.’
(Ahmed, 2017: 10).

10. ‘There is a trade-off between
intellectual rigor, power and
coherence and capacity to
engage directly in the issues
of the hour… there’s a
hardening of the division of
labor, wherein [social
theorists] lose touch with
other kinds of labor, even
intellectual labor, or even
other kinds of work in the
same university, such as in the
sciences engineering and
design’ (Wark, 2017: 4)

11. ‘It may be a good thing to know
and cite leading authorities, but
the paradox is that the reason
someone like Marx becomes an
authority us because of their
ability to break break with the
authorities of their own time
and formulate a new
problematic within which to
think and act’ (Wark, 2017: 4)
Wark, M. 2017. General Intellects: Twenty-One
Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century. London:
Verso

12. I have called [this paper] "Old and New
Identities, Old and New Ethnicities" and
what I am going to do first is to return to
the question of identity and try to look
at some of the ways in which we are
beginning to reconceptualize that within
contemporary theoretical discourses. I
shall then go back from that theoretical
consideration to the ground of a cultural
politics. Theory is always a detour on
the way to something more
important (Hall, 1991: 42).
Hall, S. (1991) ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities" in
A.D. King (ed). Culture, Globalization and The World System.
London: Macmillan, 42-69

13. Wark, M. (2014) ‘RIP Stuart Hall’, Public Seminar.
Available at:
http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/02/rip-stuar
t-hall/#.WVUGioTyuUk

14. ‘When we are taught that we cannot
know things unless we are taught by
great minds, we submit to a whole
suite of unfree practices that take
on the form of a colonial relation…
Forgetting becomes a way of
resisting the heroic and grand logics
of recall and unleashes new forms of
memory that relate to spectrality
than to hard evidence, to lost
genealogies than to inheritance, to
erasure than to inscription’
(Halberstam, 2011: 14-15).
Halberstam, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press

15. Low theory is ‘a mode of accessibility, but we
might also think about it as a kind of
theoretical model that flies below the radar,
that is assembled from eccentric texts and
examples and that refused to confirm the
hierarchies of knowing that maintain the high
in high theory’ (Halberstam, 2011: 16).

16. ‘I do believe that if you watch
Dude, where’s my car? slowly and
repeatedly and while perfectly
sober,the mysteries of the
universe will be revealed to you. I
also believe that Finding Nemo
contains a secret plan for world
revolution and that Chicken Run
charts an outline of feminist
utopia for those who can beyond
the feathers and the egg. I believe
in low theory in popular places… I
believe in making a difference by
thinking little thoughts and
sharing them widely’(Halberstam,
2011: 21).

17. Thanks!!