Do you ever sit down to read theory and start to totally get into it, though you are sure that you're not getting it?
Much of my readings in my TechnoPolitics course have been like that for me. With the exception (oddly) of Heidegger and Marx, I keep delving into to works, reading them and walking away after with the niggling notion that I've only glossed them. That I've missed their profoundness and their applicability to the academic becoming that is me.
Another of those happened today, not in a book this time but in an extract from a cultural studies reader for my Advanced Topics in Cultural Studies course. The chapter in question is by postcolonial theorist Homi Babha. His ideas on intersubjectivity, the subversive possibilities of agency through language, and his readings of Arendt, Bakhtin, Derrida, etc. all feel profoundly right to me. Yet I don't claim to be understanding more than 20% of this.
I wonder how common that feeling is for other becoming academics?
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2 comments:
I know what you mean. After every theory class, I have been able to go back and re-read some of the texts that I 'missed' and understood it in a new light. I think it's all part of the knowledge game.
That's a good point, actually. I re-read Lyotard and some Arendt recently and in light of stuff I know now, I certainly got more out of it.
Though again, I'm always better with theory I talk about aloud with others -- verbal collaborate learning style, I guess? Which is why conferences and symposiums and reading groups are probably going to be important to me.
What do you do when you find theory important but somewhat inscrutable, especially for those post-Derrida follower type writers?
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