5 things (about a new theory)

Apr 6, 2007 Alun Life, Politics 1 Comment Academia, Memes, Theory, William J. Turkel

I was tagged a while back by Wil­liam J. Turkel at Digital His­tory Hacks. He’s taken the 5 things about me meme and changed it into 5 Things (about Memes and the Blo­go­sphere), along with a request for tagged people to take it and twist it. I wrote the meme below. Spe­cific­ally it was writ­ten after read­ing a fairly dull paper which pulled the trick of put­ting points 2 and 3 in suc­ceed­ing sen­tences with no trace of irony. I left it in the draft bank in case any­thing bet­ter occurred to me. It’s a couple of months later and I’m off to take a break after think­ing about what a good Archae­olo­gical The­ory course would look like. Look­ing at it, I think I’m broadly right.

I sus­pect the fol­low­ing points could describe any the­ory in the social sci­ences that annoys you.

1. Whatever it is you’re study­ing will provide the per­fect example of the bold insights that New The­ory can bring to a topic.
2. Any praise of another New Theorist’s work is also praise of your work as it recog­nises the import­ance of New The­ory.
3. Any cri­ti­cism of another New Theorist’s work does not apply to your work as your work will be sig­ni­fic­antly dif­fer­ent in at least three import­ant aspects, and the cri­ti­cism does not recog­nise the vibrant diversity of New The­ory.
4. Any fail­ure of New The­ory to solve any ques­tions people were ask­ing before its arrival simply illus­trates that people were ask­ing the wrong questions.
5. Old The­ory is the product of the polit­ical pre­ju­dices of the time. Awk­ward ques­tions from Old The­or­ists can there­fore be dis­missed. The same would apply to New The­ory, were it not for the fact that New The­ory is far too new to be cri­tiqued in the same way.