Discourse-centered theory treats knowing the world as totalizing and thus evades material change

Evidence

Any attempt to know the world as a whole, or to hold that it is open to rational comprehension, let alone the desire to change it, was to be dismissed as a contemptible attempt to construct ‘grand narratives’ and ‘totalizing (totalitarian?) knowledges’ The theorist spoke often enough of imperialism and nationalism, sometimes as dialectical opposites but increasingly as twin faces of the same falsity, bur the main business of radicalism came to reside in the rejection of rationalism itself (the Enlightenment project, as it came to be called). — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 281

Categorization

• XREF: This is Ahmad’s core materialist critique of the discourse-first move — connects to the reader’s project on how ‘strategic essentialism’ becomes materially evasive, and to Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended lineage. — connects to: Discourse theory’s claim that nothing exists outside discourse is reductionism upward; Extreme Foucauldian premises reduce theory to passive consumption of discourse — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 112; Poststructuralist subject-dispersal theory in American dilution replaced inquiry with endless conversation

Broader Connections

• Discourse theory’s claim that nothing exists outside discourse is reductionism upward #complicates (0.85)
• Extreme Foucauldian premises reduce theory to passive consumption of discourse #complicates (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 112