Antifoundational theories involuntarily grow their own hidden foundations
Evidence
What is being described is the formal tendency of a system or a method to complete itself and to endow itself, against its own will and vocation, with a foundation that grounds it. This general observation about the tendency of “foundations” to return via some extreme form of the return of the repressed within the most antifoundational outlooks must be distinguished from judgments on the specific foundational level in question; in this case that identification of the self and private property which fitfully offers an alternate reading — an interpretive temptation, waxing and waning throughout Michaels’s text — of a book about which we can affirm with some confidence that it is not the correct reading and by no means corresponds to the author’s intention. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 455
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clear articulation of the ‘foundation’s return’ mechanism, useful for the reader’s need to understand the theoretical core.
- XREF: connects to: No theory can exempt itself from the partial unfitness it attributes to other strategies — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1771; Reversing valuation traps liberation theory inside the dualistic structure it flees — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 39; Nomadism’s anticonformism does not automatically make it subversive — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 115 (+4 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: No theory can exempt itself from the partial unfitness it attributes to other strategies — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1771; Reversing valuation traps liberation theory inside the dualistic structure it flees — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 39; Nomadism’s anticonformism does not automatically make it subversive — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 115 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Methodological self-consciousness frees scholars from inherited ideological frameworks
#complicates(0.78) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 827