Avidly Reads Theory

by Jordan Alexander Stein

We were cognizant that the world of perfect ideas shares an open border with the world of imperfect people—those who are impressed with their own cleverness, who

some people are interested in theory for the big ideas, the great learning, or the knowledge it promises; but like Feminist Ryan Gosling, my college friends and I were interested in theory for what we could do with it.

That process of discipline usually finds the energies that come with things like excitement, curiosity, and ambition in tension with those that come with other things like self-doubt, futility, and shame.

how missing the serious theoretical point of your reading can, all the same, be a way of arriving at an equally significant point.

Or, as a very bright young woman once wrote, unbidden, on her final exam for my intro theory course, “Your mama’s so classless, she could be a Marxist utopia.”

Adorno calls an unbearable world by its name, and we laugh not because we fail to believe him but because we believe him entirely. One of the functions of humor, after all, is to make bearable something that basically isn’t or shouldn’t be.

directing our irony (as in these actual examples from my youth) at economic and technological aspects of our globalizing world positioned irony neatly, if unintentionally, as a force opposed to Adornian exposure-based insight. We weren’t critiquing the ascent of late capitalism; we were finding the language that would let us live in it.

contra my more serious theoretical fam,

This language typifies why I love this book.

reading Kant was not only not fun but also made me feel unusually stupid.

I never told anyone about this feat of what now seems like wild overpreparation because I was so full of shame that I hadn’t already read everything.

But I was drawn to the thing that made me feel stupid because I wanted to obliterate that feeling of stupidity through mastery.