The Spectral Ball of Theory: a lyrical essay [Exclusive]

B.W. Powe
Department of English, York U

Perestroika means restructuring. It also means breakdown. It’s what Tony Kushner calls Part Two of his masterwork, Angels in America. The play opens in the Hall of Deputies, in the Kremlin, in 1986, on the historical cusp that is the fall of Communism. The first monologue is spoken by the Oldest Living Bolshevik, Alexsii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov. The puns in his name give the game away. He’s a dinosaur. Still, he gives an inspired rant on the end of Marxist theory. It was this theory that gave shape and meaning to history’s scramble and unpredictability. What follows then?
And Theory? How to proceed without Theory? What System of Thought have these reformers to present to this mad swirling planetary disorganization, to the Inevident Welter of fact, event, phenomenon, calamity? Do they have, as we did, a beautiful Theory, as bold, as Grand, as comprehensive a construct…? change? Yes, we must only show me the Theory, and I will be at the barricades, show me the book of the Next Beautiful Theory, and I promise you these blind eyes will see again, just to read it, to devour that text. Show me the words that will reorder the world, or else be silent.
Notice the evocation of blinding revelation, Oedipus at Colonus. Observe the rage for the message, for coherence. The speech is avid. It reveals how we must look for the grand unifying concept, the singular line, and not just for details and impressions in the calamities and ecstasies of sprawling experience. We search for the passionate idea that will transform us.
The appeal of theory is clear. It’s the sublime construct, the comprehensive tidying synthesis. With the animating idea, with a theoretical architecture in mind, people live inspired and impassioned lives. They’ve been to the top of the mountain, where they can gaze back and see the valley. Theorists must wonder what could ever replace such missionary importance. What lens helps you to see? How do you place yourself inside an expanding vision? How do sleepers awaken? How do we fight against the chaos that can swarm and engulf us at any moment?
Theory thus comes. It’s the pathway through the dark forest. It’s the closet confessional, and it’s insulation against jumble, wobble, backsliding, jibing, fuzziness, evasion, unease, susceptibility. Theory reabsorbs the world so randomness disappears. Sense gleams. Theory is a form of sacrifice. It’s the courageous symmetry set off against infinite possibility, the vertigo of unlimited information. It’s sacrificial because the originator must know his theory will be attacked. One day the theory will be demolished and replaced by another structure. It’s the law of theory. One replaces another. Theory must bleed into nothingness or become a quaint object of study (people once believed that?…). A theory shows how you could cling to almost anything that helps to explain the inexplicable, and the ineffable.
*
Here is the restlessness, the appropriating ambitiousness, of theory: it strives to swallow everything. It will absorb lovers, parents, friends, acquaintances, partners, objects, elements and pets. Roland Barthes gently insisted in his writings on a non-theoretical, non-systematic position—a variety of stances. Hence he notoriously called himself a lover, a promiscuous reader. He was a Casanova of books, in love with the kiss and tongue of words.
Yet Barthes’ pronouncement, no matter how wily or impish, is still part of the theoretical alignment. A Don Juan of ideas, wary of commitment, nevertheless craves total immersion, the tantalizing touch of new propositions. A theory is a form of monogamy.One idea becomes the enduring partner. Anti-theories are serial monogamy. They are fidelity to the many. The puritanical streak in theory gives way to sampling and erotic attraction to the next text that is like a delicious kiss. To the anti-theorist it is hard to stay on a diet when the world of books is an orgiastic buffet. To the theorist the monogamous marriage helps to focus and channel the sensual riot of choice.
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And yet theory is a form of waking dream. It adds to consciousness. It’s an addition to the phantasmagoria of life, an attempt to hold on to the apparitions and see them clearly.
A theory can be a seed, planted for others in rich soil for others to watch grow. The others could then harvest the crop and consume it. They may raze it to the ground later, and leave the ground fallow for more seeds.
Theory can be a labyrinth set to snare a ravening beast of body and mind. Those powers may be sex, death, love, power, gods, or God. A theory can be a harpoon fired into the belly of the incomprehensible leviathan of the real. All theorists become Ahab. Their theories are the Pequod, the focus of their divine quest the unspeakable thing, the mystery that impels us.
Theory provides rigour (so we’re told). It hones the mind, helping to train memory, to guide perception, to sharpen attention, to improve slovenly organizational skills. Theory is the intellectual’s form of Yoga. It yokes the mind with the flesh of the studied material. It’s interesting that we call subjects “material”, illuminating their physicality, their apparently random atomic nature.
*
The grand theory, once constructed, can be a shrine on the road to other shrines. It will have to be bypassed by the pilgrim of thought, but not before paying homage. But the next shrine may be the one that shatters the mindset of the architect of the previous edifice.
Suddenly the mental pilgrim sees new light, where before he saw only riddling holes.
*
Jorge Luis Borges called theories “didactic constructs.”
He distrusted them because of their reductions. He preferred solitary imaginings, the powerful pride and concentrated meandering of his labyrinths. By grasping after the reality that was ordered by literature, he saw no division between the poetic and the prosaic.
The greater the work of art, the more it evades theory.
Yet we seem to need a theory, an angle, to see anything at all, whether it’s a book or a tree. Yet the stronger the work, then like a tree, it will evade whatever we say about it. It will remain outside the reach of words. A strong book is always greater than anything either a wise man or a fool will say about it. Millions of words have been discharged at James Joyce’s Ulysses, hundreds of thousands on Anne Carson’s prose-poetics, yet the writings, like a rain drop or a sunflower, remain irreducible, irrefutably other.
*
Still theory is an indelible form of knowledge. What would English Departments at modern Universities do without theory? But when theory becomes insulation against chaos and sorrow, it always arrives too late. Theory gives brief pleasures because it offers a safety net, a secure web, so it seems. But when we are being honest with ourselves we know that security is transitory—another of our necessary fictions (or delusions). Webs shred. The holes in nets grow larger. Gaps yawn. Breakdown looms.
Theory provides reassurance. The theorist can be confident about his indispensable sense of explanatory decisiveness. You (the theorist) acted. We (his readers) are going this way. We should go on in this way because it’s at least clear. Theory blasts a way through the dark woods, over the widening gaps, and sets a light on the bridge and path ahead. The facts fit. Now we can sleep. The beast has been subdued. We can sleep deeply. After all, few can bear to be awake all the time.
*
A sublime theory—one that tries to gather up everything—has to be big. If it isn’t big, it won’t spill over. And a theory must be a concentration of energy that nevertheless permits surplus. It is the surplus that is useful to others.
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Theorists who declare that they have no theory, or who say their theories are provisional, or who say that theory is a stepping stone to another network of thought, or who say that their goal is exploration and not security, or who say that their theories are probes or prophecies, are postponing finality, death.
*
Theory is reassuring consistency in the face of a sudden shocking illumination. One abandons theory when one is in the grip, in the possession, of the immediate. Theory appears to subdue and systematize illuminations. They come upon us without preparation or preliminaries. There is no seduction in illumination. Visions break down, break into, break through, break upon, break free. The sacred requires breakage from the consistency of linear conceptualization, our arrangements of reality. It deals in the abrupt. Theory wants to corral the sacred and turn it into something humanly intelligible.
The person who rebels against theory may wish to be something other than an idea or a thought. You may wish to be a meteor, to be the flame at the tip of the match, to be Icarus, to be the dove that cuts away from a flock in high flight, to be the leaf that keeps turning colours and refuses to fall during its time in October, to be the wolf still dreaming of his lifetime mate.
*
The so-called death of theory is the beginning of lightning joy and terror, surely awe. Once the meaningful structure is demolished, you’re left in the open: naked. You’re vulnerable to exposure. That moment is a tremor in the tip of the precipice. The abyss beckons. It says, jump or turn away. But you must do something.
Can anyone exist without a theory or a story or a code or a creed or a faith or a rigorous devotion or an esoteric underlying structure or an ardent idea? They help us to bridge a way through turmoil, always towards repose. The clearing away of an old theory (the gaze and frame we’ve been given from our traditions) is the beginning of exodus, wandering in the desert, the start of the infant’s howl.
*
The endgame of theory is presented to us in the last act of Perestroika. The survivors of the plague, Louis, Hannah, Belize, and Prior, gather in winter gray under the stone angel of Bethesda Fountain in New York City. Bethesda means “House of Mercy” and “Pool of Life.” (Although Penial—“the Face of God”—is the name for the site where Jacob wrestled with the Angel, in Genesis 32.)
They confer on the drama of their past. Then they reflect on how “you can’t wait around for a theory. The sprawl of life, the weird…” so says Louis. Hannah completes Louis’s sentence with the word “Interconnectedness.” Belize remarks, “The world is
faster than the mind.” But Hannah insists, “It’s living that makes the idea. You can’t wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory.” The world is quicker than perception, life’s currents move with us and beyond us. The forms of existence are greater than our thoughts. Theory gives focus, but experience requires surrender. The question remains, how do you see or apprehend experience. The window frame cracks. Light pours in, the wind tears through. You need another frame to slant the light, and to insulate against the wind.
Prior, the so-called prophet, urges them all to look at the stone angel. This seems to recommend that we look to story and to symbols. The angel is a magnificent old fountain sculpture. At that time, “February 1990”, the water is off. What lies at the bottom of the pool is frozen, dormant. Prior says, the fountain will return soon, yes it will return to overflowing. That overflow speaks of sources and abundance. The overflow speaks of beauty and the mystery of the currents in existence. Look homeward, angel. Look onward, angel.
*
Perestroika ends with Prior stepping forward, speaking to the audience, giving the blessing.
*
The point surely is—there is more. There is always more than we can say.
If we eat the sky, we’ll call out for the stars. If we drink the sea, we’ll still call out for depths.

EXCLUSIVE

B.W. Powe has given Excalibur permission to print this unpublished essay. This piece was originally planned as an appendix to his upcoming book Apocalypse and Alchemy: Visions of Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, but it now stands on its own. Due to space limitations, we can only print excerpts in this issue. The complete text can be found on Excalibur’s website.
Excalibur would like to thank B.W. Powe and wish him much success on his sabbatical. He will be missed this year.
Your students,
Ernest Reid and Karl Leschinsky