Anti-theory defines theory as the splitting apart of terms that are actually inseparable.

Evidence

That is not, however, what that essay “meant” by “theory,” something that can now be recapitulated with all the concision of its authors, namely, “the tendency to generate theoretical problems by splitting apart terms that are in fact inseparable” (AT12). This tendency is then identified and localized in two kinds of privileged error: the separation of “authorial intention and the meaning of texts” (AT12), and a larger, or more “epistemological” pathology, in which “knowledge” is separated from “beliefs,” generating the notion that we can somehow “stand outside our beliefs” (AT27), such that “theory” now becomes “the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without” (AT 30). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 423

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson is defining the specific anti-theory position he is critiquing — theory as the separation of intention from meaning, and knowledge from belief.