Speaking of "the maelstrom that is The Valve," I got sucked in more than I expected recently, after John Holbo decided that my previous post was, shall we say, plain wrong. John seemed to take objection to the idea that "theory" provides a valuable bulwark against the empiricism and data-heavy model of education offered under No Child Left Behind. Seemed to, but he didn't really. His actual objection was to "Theory," a capitalized and more delimited version of theory, that is miraculously both very dangerous and very ineffectual at the same time.
I don't need to spend too much time on this, as my inclusion in the debate was for straw-person purposes only, and my responses to my inclusion are already available in the Valve's comments. But I do want to stress an argument I made there: the real political stakes have nothing to do with capitalized "Theory's" success or lack thereof; rather, they have everything to do with the authority and mechanisms by which Theory is homogenized and defined as something distinct from theory itself.
As a lower-case concept, theory is simply the name we assign to the practice of reflecting on our own practices, be they writing, or reading, or watching, or playing, or whatever. To write of a need for a definition, to proffer that definition, and then to castigate the object that you yourself have defined is precisely the sort of theoretical maneuver that should be subject to rigorous questioning. To dismiss the need for a definition, to negate or devalue some extant definitional claim, or to malign those that would attempt otherwise - these moves also demand interrogation. What makes theory so important, so essential, to pedagogy and to politics is precisely that it refuses to accept as a given the sorts of practices that obtain in everyday life. In so doing, theoretical investigation forces us to move, even if only to reaffirm our beliefs, rather than letting us sediment and presume the existence of fact when all we have is facticity.
Now, can theory be reified as something like an aggregate or a subject in ways that are maladaptive to the contexts in which theory is needed? Absolutely. But no one who does "theory" worth their salt would ever speak of "Theory" in this way, and so to read Holbo's constant anti-Theory rallying cry as a proactive defense against the imposition of oh-so tyrannical "Theory" is laughable, since he is himself producing the very gesture he finds so problematic. Instead, let us simply note, as Michael Bérubé did about Ward Churchill, that we can agree that we all have the ability to write and read what we want, just as we have the ability to dismiss what is written and read as being not worthy of our intellectual affirmation.
More goodness regarding the issue can be found courtesy of Mark Kaplan and Michael Bérubé.