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Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas
A vital and timely reminder that modern life owes as much to outlandish thinking as to dominant ideologies
What do the Nag Hammadi library, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code , speculative feminist historiography, Marcus Garvey’s finances, and maps drawn by asylum patients have in common? Jonathan P. Eburne explores this question as never before in Outsider Theory , a timely book about outlandish ideas. Eburne brings readers on an adventure in intellectual history that stresses the urgency of taking seriously—especially in an era of fake news—ideas that might otherwise be discarded or regarded as errant, unfashionable, or even unreasonable. Examining the role of such thinking in contemporary intellectual history, Eburne challenges the categorical demarcation of good ideas from flawed, wild, or bad ones, addressing the surprising extent to which speculative inquiry extends beyond the work of professional intellectuals to include that of nonprofessionals as well, whether amateurs, unfashionable observers, or the clinically insane. Considering the work of a variety of such figures—from popular occult writers and gnostics to so-called outsider artists and pseudoscientists—Eburne argues that an understanding of its circulation and recirculation is indispensable to the history of ideas. He devotes close attention to ideas and texts usually omitted from or marginalized within orthodox histories of literary modernism, critical theory, and continental philosophy, yet which have long garnered the critical attention of specialists in religion, science studies, critical race theory, and the history of the occult. In doing so he not only sheds new light on a fascinating body of creative thought but also proposes new approaches for situating contemporary humanities scholarship within the history of ideas. However important it might be to protect ourselves from “bad” ideas, Outsider Theory shows how crucial it is for us to know how and why such ideas have left their impression on modern-day thinking and continue to shape its evolution.
What do the Nag Hammadi library, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code , speculative feminist historiography, Marcus Garvey’s finances, and maps drawn by asylum patients have in common? Jonathan P. Eburne explores this question as never before in Outsider Theory , a timely book about outlandish ideas. Eburne brings readers on an adventure in intellectual history that stresses the urgency of taking seriously—especially in an era of fake news—ideas that might otherwise be discarded or regarded as errant, unfashionable, or even unreasonable. Examining the role of such thinking in contemporary intellectual history, Eburne challenges the categorical demarcation of good ideas from flawed, wild, or bad ones, addressing the surprising extent to which speculative inquiry extends beyond the work of professional intellectuals to include that of nonprofessionals as well, whether amateurs, unfashionable observers, or the clinically insane. Considering the work of a variety of such figures—from popular occult writers and gnostics to so-called outsider artists and pseudoscientists—Eburne argues that an understanding of its circulation and recirculation is indispensable to the history of ideas. He devotes close attention to ideas and texts usually omitted from or marginalized within orthodox histories of literary modernism, critical theory, and continental philosophy, yet which have long garnered the critical attention of specialists in religion, science studies, critical race theory, and the history of the occult. In doing so he not only sheds new light on a fascinating body of creative thought but also proposes new approaches for situating contemporary humanities scholarship within the history of ideas. However important it might be to protect ourselves from “bad” ideas, Outsider Theory shows how crucial it is for us to know how and why such ideas have left their impression on modern-day thinking and continue to shape its evolution.
424 pages, Paperback
Published September 18, 2018
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March 28, 2019This book is a collection of essays in intellectual history, touching consistently on a few core themes: the ever-shifting lines regarding what is 'eccentric' or 'fringe' thought; the construction of the ‘inside’, i.e. ‘normal’ thought by the ‘outside’; and above all, the fructiveness of an imaginative-sympathetic, quasi-faux-agentic method of reading texts as themselves performatively re-dramatizing and challenging the resistances they generate.
This approach generates some interesting material. The chapters on Dan Brown, Riane Eisler & Gnosticism have some good, rigorous stuff. It's an engaging way of doing intellectual history. And there is some fine (if standard) discussion of sociology of science--Feyerabend, Latour, etc. A self-proclaimed emphasis on a 'sociological' viewpoint seems largely to take the form of the pervasive academic combination of right-on politics ('more room needed for marginalized voices,' etc.) and the necessary ability to ritually emphasize, time & again, the manifold vicissitudes of historical contingency.
As a work of intellectual history, it is mostly quite adept--and Eburne has come up with a nifty little 'hook', this notion of "outsider theory." But when it comes down to the core of what he's up to--beyond description and exegesis, I mean: the bold beating heart that should by rights animate something presenting itself as a departure from the timorousness of ordinary scholarship: a promising road for an adventurous mind (as opposed, perhaps, to simply another productive academic) to travel down--it's fairly thin. There's no bracing blunt methodological take-away in sight, no fatty theoretical shank lovingly spit-roasted for hungry teeth. Some extracts will help to illustrate.
Page 240: ""Outsider theory" describes such oblique processes of reception rather than naming the self-evident unreason or reason of the ideas themselves."
[Translation: In this book I am doing politico-epistemologically nonjudgmental intellectual history of eccentric ideas. The content of my project is the very announcement of it, a mystical union at work in the word "describes."]
Page 323: "I propose, in other words, the possibility that Velikovsky's theories, with whatever unintentional irony--and indeed, almost certainly unconsciously--think this epistemic "revolution" as it unfolded through the advocacy and rejection of his work."
[Translation: Methodologically speaking, nothing really justifies it, but hey, this quasi-Freudian approach seems fun; let's do this.]
Eburne's deeper problem, though, is that the workaday academic soul can't actually connect anyone else with the epistemo-existential freedom imputed to the 'outside.' (That's what Bataille and Sun Ra are for!) The rhetoric goes florid in a few spots:
"To fall deliberately out of step with this dominant mode is...also...to exercise on behalf of thought a right to creativity or even opacity--testifying not only to a manifold archive of forms and concepts but also to an open set of possibilities for their deployment, obscure and propitious."
[Translation: isn't human eccentricity great and exciting? Aren't minds terrifying? Anyway, herein plant I my flag of finely calibrated, politically non-threatening pro-weirdness-ness!--and demand boldly the right of scholarship to do exegesis on more and different books!--and to assert the value of those books! Won't it be rad if more scholars can intellectualize and then, I dunno, re-de-intellectualize the texts of non-standard or not-quite intellectuals?]
If I were a fellow academic I would accuse Eburne of "Gentrification of the Weird" or something, but I'd just be adding to the problem. Not a bad book, but contra the LA Review of Books, emphatically NOT "a truly weird read." Would that it were so.
This approach generates some interesting material. The chapters on Dan Brown, Riane Eisler & Gnosticism have some good, rigorous stuff. It's an engaging way of doing intellectual history. And there is some fine (if standard) discussion of sociology of science--Feyerabend, Latour, etc. A self-proclaimed emphasis on a 'sociological' viewpoint seems largely to take the form of the pervasive academic combination of right-on politics ('more room needed for marginalized voices,' etc.) and the necessary ability to ritually emphasize, time & again, the manifold vicissitudes of historical contingency.
As a work of intellectual history, it is mostly quite adept--and Eburne has come up with a nifty little 'hook', this notion of "outsider theory." But when it comes down to the core of what he's up to--beyond description and exegesis, I mean: the bold beating heart that should by rights animate something presenting itself as a departure from the timorousness of ordinary scholarship: a promising road for an adventurous mind (as opposed, perhaps, to simply another productive academic) to travel down--it's fairly thin. There's no bracing blunt methodological take-away in sight, no fatty theoretical shank lovingly spit-roasted for hungry teeth. Some extracts will help to illustrate.
Page 240: ""Outsider theory" describes such oblique processes of reception rather than naming the self-evident unreason or reason of the ideas themselves."
[Translation: In this book I am doing politico-epistemologically nonjudgmental intellectual history of eccentric ideas. The content of my project is the very announcement of it, a mystical union at work in the word "describes."]
Page 323: "I propose, in other words, the possibility that Velikovsky's theories, with whatever unintentional irony--and indeed, almost certainly unconsciously--think this epistemic "revolution" as it unfolded through the advocacy and rejection of his work."
[Translation: Methodologically speaking, nothing really justifies it, but hey, this quasi-Freudian approach seems fun; let's do this.]
Eburne's deeper problem, though, is that the workaday academic soul can't actually connect anyone else with the epistemo-existential freedom imputed to the 'outside.' (That's what Bataille and Sun Ra are for!) The rhetoric goes florid in a few spots:
"To fall deliberately out of step with this dominant mode is...also...to exercise on behalf of thought a right to creativity or even opacity--testifying not only to a manifold archive of forms and concepts but also to an open set of possibilities for their deployment, obscure and propitious."
[Translation: isn't human eccentricity great and exciting? Aren't minds terrifying? Anyway, herein plant I my flag of finely calibrated, politically non-threatening pro-weirdness-ness!--and demand boldly the right of scholarship to do exegesis on more and different books!--and to assert the value of those books! Won't it be rad if more scholars can intellectualize and then, I dunno, re-de-intellectualize the texts of non-standard or not-quite intellectuals?]
If I were a fellow academic I would accuse Eburne of "Gentrification of the Weird" or something, but I'd just be adding to the problem. Not a bad book, but contra the LA Review of Books, emphatically NOT "a truly weird read." Would that it were so.
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