Towards an ethics of the theoretical encounter

Abstract

This article is taken from a presentation I give graduate students on how to make use of theory in the process of writing their thesis. It aims to highlight a pragmatic and practical orientation to theory and to subordinate it to the more important goal of making sense of one’s research object and one’s research material. As such it is structured by the tension between the deployment of theory as a mark of sophistication and a form of cultural capital, and the deployment of theory in terms of its analytical ‘use’ value. Most importantly, it argues for the importance of making theory generate new insights which would otherwise be impossible without it. It exemplifies this through a reflexive loop where the theories of Marx, Bourdieu and Freud are activated to show how they can generate different insights about how writers relate to theory.