I increasingly have the suspicion that intense adherents to specific, rigorous theoretical frameworks are not acting in their best interests. By "best interests" I mean general benefit; by "theoretical frameworks" I mean something some guy once wrote or said. If "theoretical frameworks" is an unfamiliar concept to you, surely the notion of taking something someone more brilliant than you once wrote or said, and peppering those sentiments in amongst the pithy observations you yourself have made, strikes a certain chord. "Theoretical frameworks" is a more intense version of that. Anything with an "-ism" is, once was, or soon will be a theoretical framework. Also any term incorporating a proper name (e.g. Marxian, Freudian, Lacanian, Barthesian, Hegelian, ad infinitum...).

The observations of these thinkers are truly great, and I write that completely without irony. It is really amazing to read the things Marx wrote some two hundred years ago, and to read how those things were taken up by Marxists of later generations, debated in academic circles as autonomous "concepts," ultimately "posted" by post-Marxists; and yet still these things Marx wrote maintain a vibrancy that keeps them illuminating even to this day. It is the same of the other theoretical frameworks.

What I have noticed is the tendency of certain "Marxists"--and I mean here especially students, graduate or otherwise, teachers and armchair academics, not necessarily the Raymond Williams's and the Fred Jameson's, though I guess they are as well implicated--to commit so whole-heartedly to the world-view of "Marxism" that the world-view thus inscribed is no longer in their best interests. That is to say, Why keep refiguring the world as an oppressive one, in the style of Marx, when it is not in your best interests to think of the world in the style of Marx?

At the outset, this proposition reeks of plain defeatism. But there is a deeper idea I am trying to get at: that is, Why would anyone believe so strongly in any of these theoretical frameworks to begin with? A theoretical framework is an abstract grid, laid over the world; it prescribes, at least partially, the world it spits back at you. The obsessive impulse to lay this or that grid inexhaustibly over the world demonstrates a desire to master the world with this or that grid, and, in this respect, the adherent to theoretical frameworks implicitly accepts and endorses the world-view his or her theoretical framework posits. Which is to say that "Marxism" is a tainted concept, if only in so far as it habitually asserts and re-asserts the inferior position of the "Marxist" in relation to the dominant culture. It is the same of the other theoretical frameworks.

This does not seem to be in our best interests.