Theory use stays healthy only when ready to jettison it

Evidence

If you set it to work, with a view also to testing the theory and seeing where resistances come up, I would think it very useful, because you have what you have, and you are going with it, but you are prepared to lose it all—it’s like investing in venture capital. I know about this, because at a certain point, I was encouraged by people active in the postcolonial field to sink some cash in a [laughing] miracle membrane for cleaning water. What good it would do! I then thought that I could afford perhaps to lose $2,500. And indeed I lost it! That’s how you use these theories. Ready to jettison them. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2423

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Spivak’s venture-capital metaphor for holding theory tentatively — directly speaks to whether strategic essentialism can be sustained without residence-in — the ‘ready to lose it all’ posture as the condition of non-collapse.
• SEED: Angle: ‘strategic essentialism as venture capital’ — the financial metaphor for ironic theoretical commitment, contrast with those who sink fixed capital into identity.
• XREF: connects to: Theory is valuable only when one must struggle against it — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 242; Theory is best engaged as struggle rather than fluent agreement; Theory must be endlessly repeated as practice or it atrophies — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 793 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Theory is valuable only when one must struggle against it #corroborates (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 242
• Theory is best engaged as struggle rather than fluent agreement #corroborates (0.82)
• Theory must be endlessly repeated as practice or it atrophies #contradicts (0.80) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 793