So when you hear the term theory,
what immediately comes to mind?
Immediately?
Immediately.
The thing that comes to mind is like complicated
because I feel like we all have such different relationships
with the idea of theory.
And I also think that it changes so much
according to the field you're in.
What immediately comes to mind for me is music
because there's a lot of theory involved in music.
For me, theories are just ideas.
So that's the first thing that comes to my mind.
Well, for me, theory would be the compilation of statements,
rules, and definitions from a specific discipline.
But in the humanities, I think just theory is something
that we cannot do without, but also we really want to do without it.
Great. OK, so that was Room Tone.
And now we're recording.
So I'd say let's get started.
OK, should I introduce things?
Yes, please.
Theory from the Greek theoria.
When the ancient Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides used the term,
they simply meant observation, appearance or view.
But with Plato and especially with his student Aristotle,
the term eventually came to be associated with activities of the intellect,
like contemplation and study, an association that continues into the present.
The Western history of ideas witnessed an explosion of interest in theory
with the advent of the 20th century.
The intellectuals of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory,
which had its heyday in the decades surrounding the Second World War,
argued that the merely interpretive role that had been assigned
to the theoretical disciplines of philosophy,
literary studies, history, psychology and others was inadequate.
These disciplines were inadequate, they argued, to the task of criticizing
the oppressive ideological and material forces present in Western capitalist societies.
From that point onward, theory came to be associated in the humanities
more often than not with critique.
Shortly thereafter, structuralism and then post structuralism
with such French intellectuals as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault,
emerged as intellectual movements whose purpose it was to challenge
the foundational literary and philosophical assumptions of the modern West.
In the latter half of the 20th century, these two streams of critical thought
jointly gave rise to a wide variety of theoretical discourses,
such as feminist theory and post-colonial theory.
Theory and theories have only continued to grow and multiply into the 21st century.
In this episode of What Does That Mean, our panel takes a stab at the question,
what does the term theory actually mean?
Hello everyone, my name is Jerome, and today we will be discussing
the concept of theory, and I'm a master's student at the University of Manitoba
studying religion, and I am joined by three lovely people,
and I'll allow each of them to introduce themselves,
but we have Lys, Anthony, and Wersha.
And maybe Lys, I'll start with you, if you could just introduce yourself,
your field of study, and anything else that you'd like to share with us.
Yeah, thanks, Jerome. My name is Lys Furtig, and I'm a writer, a literary translator,
and a seventh-year PhD candidate in comparative literature
at the University of Michigan.
My main areas of study are sound studies, radio, podcasting, and audio culture.
I'm currently completing my dissertation on radio drama by Austrian women authors
in the post-war period. It's titled, Radio Poetics, Sound, and Gender-Based.
Radio Poetics, Sound, and Gendered Subjectivity in the Austrian Hirschbill
after 1945, and Hirschbill is the German word for radio drama.
And I'm excited to be here today.
Cool, thank you so much.
All right, next is Wersha. Introduce yourself, please.
Hi, this is Wersha. Wersha means blessing in Mongolia.
I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University.
My research focuses on folk art with a special concern for traditional textiles
across Asia and other craft practices in southwest China and along the Silk Road.
So currently I'm writing my dissertation.
I'm also working as graduate assistant in the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University.
So I'm glad to be here. Join you all for the podcast.
Wonderful. Thank you, Wersha. And last but not least, Anthony.
Hi, everyone. Thanks, Jerome. So my name is Anthony.
I'm a first-year PhD student at Rutgers University,
and I am most interested in researching Victorian literature
as it has inscribed the transition to fossil fuel economies.
So I'm very excited to be here and to have this conversation about
what we are always talking about without any specificity, but theory.
Awesome. Yeah, thank you, everyone.
It's just lovely to have such a diverse group, I think, of scholars tackling this question.
Should make for some interesting discussion for sure.
OK, so how I'd like to begin is I'd like to, I think, just have us all grab the bull by the horns
and just see if we can come up with a definition of theory.
And if we succeed, great. We'll have succeeded where most others have failed.
So that's awesome. No small achievement there.
But in any case, even if we fail, it'll be interesting.
So here's how I thought we'd do this. I thought I'd have each of you pick
what you believe to be the closest synonym to theory.
But each of you has to pick a different one.
So I don't know which one of you wants to go first.
But so we're aiming for three close synonyms for theory.
Maybe, Anthony, since you went last, if you want to go first, if I could put you on the spot, take it away.
Yeah, absolutely. So I have always thought of theory as a framework.
That's the way I view the term. Yeah.
Did you say a little bit more about that or?
Yeah, say a little bit framework. We'll take that term framework,
but maybe unpack that connection for us a bit if you could.
Yeah. So whenever I think about theory, I am usually I have kind of like a visual metaphor for it.
So I like to think of it as the I guess the best way to think of it is almost like the window
through which I'm viewing something else or the framework through which I'm viewing the object of study.
Since I'm usually looking at 19th century kind of, you know, Victorian fiction or European fiction more generally.
The framework that I apply to that is the energy economy.
How does it relate to the, you know, the transition to steam?
How does it relate to the use of coal as the kind of energy source?
And then, of course, the social effects of that transition and everything like that.
So I would say that theory that I use is more generally possibly called the energy humanities.
But that's another thing.
Awesome. Yeah. Thank you, Anthony. Very interesting.
OK, so we've got framework now, Wersha.
Could you give a synonym, a close synonym for us?
And then if you'd like, you can unpack it. But if not, that's totally fine, too.
Yeah, when I think about theory, so for me, for folklore, we don't have like a single ground theory
because we all draw in theory from anthropology, sociology, literature studies and other fields.
So if the one word I pick for theory, it's interdisciplinarity.
OK, interdisciplinary. All right, good. So two solid offerings.
Liss, what about you?
My mind has been spinning since you posed this question, Joe.
A couple of things come to mind. I mean, this is maybe a bit facetious,
but I almost want to say my synonym is post structuralism because in comparative literature,
there really is like when you when you say theory or often kind of short handing a specific theoretical tradition,
you might sort of write that as capital T theory, which seems to be mostly referring to, I mean, not so much one tradition as two,
but you would have sort of French post structuralist theory like the Jacques Derrida's and Roland Barthes of the world
and then sort of combined with in a weird way Frankfurt School theory, potentially also combined with psychoanalytic theory
and then kind of using these disparate but compatible philosophical discourses as a means of understanding literary texts and the way that they relate to culture.
Interesting. OK, so we'll definitely explore the compatibility idea, because I think that's really interesting when talking about theory.
And, you know, does a theory have to be coherent or do theories have to be coherent in order to be kind of subsumed under the same meta theoretical umbrella?
We'll get into that. But OK, so post structural. Would that be your word? Sure. Post structural post structuralism. Yeah. OK. Yeah.
That's that kind of cluster of phrases. Good. OK, so we've got post structural post structuralism. We've got framework and we've got interdisciplinary.
So those are three words. So here's the challenge. All right. I didn't share this with you guys ahead of time.
And so I'm putting you all on the spot right now. But now we're going to try and define theory.
And probably we're going to address the capital T type of theory. But if we address the lowercase t theory, that's fine, too.
But we're going to define theory without using any of those three words. So can't use post structural, can't use framework, can't use interdisciplinary.
This is hard, Jerome. I thought that you were going to say that we need to write a definition using all three words. And I was like, that's easy.
Yeah, you tricked us. Yeah, I did. As I was writing, as I was, you know, kind of preparing the notes, I was like, how can I make this really difficult?
And how can I just, you know, how can the listeners just have this opportunity to like hear us just squirm as we struggle? Stump the experts, stump the panelists.
Yeah. So that's about what's the stake in the board. Very important.
You were really good at this, Jerome. Very good at this. I would say that I guess I can volunteer for tribute if you all don't mind.
So taking on Jerome's excellent challenge, I would define theory as, oh boy, okay, a cluster of concepts or maybe a single concept that can be used to explain.
Let's see. I would say maybe human interaction or human behaviors or something like that. I think that that's that's how I want to say it.
Yeah. So a cluster of ideas or a single idea that can be used to explain human behaviors.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So like an explanatory set of ideas or concepts, or I guess we're using idea and concept interchangeably there, but or a single idea or a single concept, but something which explains.
Is that kind of the nucleus of your offering? Is it, you know, kind of something that explains?
Yeah, definitely. And you said it much better than I did. Thank you.
And explains human interaction or something to do with humanity, the humanities, right? That was kind of a caveat there as well.
Yeah, exactly. So I think that's probably my interest in, you know, literary studies and the humanities more generally. So yeah, it's something that I feel like when I see theory or when I approach theory, it's always as a means to explain, you know, what humans are doing.
Yeah.
Good. Good. So the object field is human stuff, somehow.
And maybe we could have a debate about what that is, but that's for another episode and another time.
Okay, good. So yeah, so we're shut and lists. What do you what do you two think about that definition? Do you have anything that you'd like to add or?
Yeah. To think about theory or theoretical approaches.
Also, another word in my mind is context, contextualized studies. So, so like folklore can be my medium, but how to use the media to interpret and to analyze the different aspects of this media.
Okay. So in the different contexts.
So for me, the folklore can be my, my media, but there will be guiding me, but looking through different contexts.
So you're adding on to Anthony's definition, right, adding the idea of context into there. So, awesome. All right. Well, this, what do you what do you make of these two offerings? Is there anything you'd like to add or anything you'd like to?
Yeah, I love that we're creating a collaborative definition here. I feel like we could keep building on this. I love what Anthony and where to have said so far, I might add that in my work in a very general sense, I think what theory helps me do is talk about the relationship between or think through the relationship between the particular specific historically situated and
a broader pattern or trend or tendency on a social civilizational scale. So kind of building bridges between the aesthetic and the social between a particular work or text, even sometimes, and I like to work in a first person mode. So even between my own experience and something more general and universal.
Okay, so let's, let's try and put those three ideas into a single like sentence if we can, or a single statement. So, someone asks you one of your undergraduate students asks you to define theory, how are you going to incorporate these three things.
So we've got contextualization right and we've got, I think Anthony was helpful in providing that basic framework of a set of ideas that explains human stuff, you to listen we're show you, you're really helpful in flushing that out but maybe like, if I could just kind of press you to add what
you're saying on to Anthony's definition does that make sense. Yeah, I really liked both of what Liz and where she added. I feel like, I really like that, where she is really kind of putting into the front the idea of context because all the humans that we are, you know, studying
are from all different places. And then, so everything is going to look very different for each one situation or experience or to their location, all these different things. And then I also really like that Liz introduced this kind of angle of almost like scale, if you want to call it that,
so that whenever you were looking at something you know just a small group of people or something like that theory also allows you to kind of step backwards and kind of I guess extrapolate from that small group to the larger social kind of ideas.
So yeah, but all three of these. I do I also I really love this collaborative definition because I feel like I've never understood it in such a robust way before. But yeah, it seems like that's kind of what we're introducing through the three of ours contributions is that theory is a way to kind of explain
or better understand human behavior in a variety of different contexts wherever they might be and whatever your own kind of I guess intellectual or disciplinary context might be, but also to with the eye of trying to build out your findings into a broader kind of like you know knowledge base, if you will, and maybe that's where we kind of get into theory can kind of lead you into a just a way of knowing things like how do we know things.
Yeah, it's really interesting Anthony, I think one of the things I was thinking about as you were speaking is that the way we use theory and literary studies is fundamentally interdisciplinary because what you're doing is you're grabbing discourses from other disciplines.
So you know when we use psychoanalytic theory, that's like, you know, in its origins, practically a medical science, obviously disputably, but it's a way of explaining human behavior and human consciousness and what lies beneath consciousness and how that influences the creation of art, the experience of looking at art being a reader, what it means in a broader social sense.
And those are tools that are necessarily built into the study of literature so it's really useful to be able to grab these established ways of understanding how the mind works.
I'm going to move us into some definition by example but I think a lot of what we've discussed is going to carry in to this next section.
So, what do I mean by definition by example well.
Here's the first question, if you could name some names like what are, what are the names that you coming from the background that you're coming from, what are the names that you associate most closely with theory, even books.
What books are fundamental.
And maybe let's start with lists let's start with you. What names do you associate with the term theory.
So, working at the intersection of German studies and media theory that the big names that I personally spend a lot of time with our Adorno so that would be kind of touching on the Frankfurt School Benjamin, Kittler, but I think the big names that come to mind.
And I feel like when we sort of invoke that capital T theory, I guess.
Can't really get around Foucault.
Yeah, no that's helpful so and that that kind of speaks to what you mentioned earlier that capital T theory is sort of split between kind of the French structuralist post structuralist types and the Frankfurt School, you know, and all the generations of the
Frankfurt School, right, I'm assuming that you wouldn't you wouldn't exclude the most recent generation of the Frankfurt School like like Axel Hannett, or Jurgen Habermas.
I wouldn't exclude them I don't work with those authors, myself. But yes, I you know I wouldn't, I'm not a Frankfurt School purist by any means so I'm not going around policing where people draw those boundaries but yeah for sure.
I would also say I mean I think something that is bound up in my personal experiential understanding of theory is that it's a traditionally European white male dominated discourse and I think that that is also a reason for maybe some of the often
used skepticism for theory, capital T theory among graduate students. I think rightly so.
At the same time, I believe in engaging these authors, you know, with a critical eye. I think there's, there's no reason to to throw out an entire discourse because we have criticisms of it I think quite the opposite.
Right, right.
Okay, wonderful. Um, where's she at. What are the names in your field, you'd associate with theory.
Interested to think about definition for the folklore the definition is a is an artist communication in small group by Ben Amos.
So you say the communication that's the words from like performance theory. So the big guy for our area will be Richard Bowman.
So we work with the world, world arts as performance. So we will be more, because our methodology will be like working in the field work, like interview observations.
So, we more guide by doing work in the area.
So like performance theories, we working in the field.
Yeah, guiding us.
So when thinking about the definitions that definitely have to be like recording each way that communication through different media, like verbal or material culture around the crafts and how they making how they communicating themselves by making the crafts.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. And so Richard Bowman, you said, was the name that is associated with that, that development in folklore.
Yeah.
Yeah, also hungry glass. They are very classic very big, big guy or feel. Yeah. Okay. Wonderful. Awesome. Thank you.
Anthony, you could share some of your names with us. And if there's overlap, by the way, if there's, if there's overlap names that's all that have already been mentioned no problem.
Well, yeah, no, I mean, I think one of the scholars that really motivates a lot of the work that I do, especially looking at you know economies and transitions within economic modes of production is of course Karl Marx.
So kind of old school right.
But of course there's been a lot of critiques of marks and Marxism and so I think I'm informed by a lot of the more recent ideas about Marxist kind of critiques, but mostly I really am looking at the ways in which people are interacting with, you know, socio economics.
I think that's a term that I use a lot in my own work and then beyond that, beyond the economic angle again I mean I guess I'm really showing my stripes as a 19th century person here.
I'm also really interested in Friedrich Nietzsche's critiques of society and religion and morality and just his style of critique more generally. So I feel like those two appear on my, in my bibliographies, the most often, and I'm usually like building up from their ideas.
And then using those to read the kind of the literature that I work with. So yeah, I would say those are my big two. But of course I have done, just to kind of reiterate some of the stuff that Liz has said, Foucault of course is a big one, Foucault is a big Nietzsche person, big kind of Marxist person.
So I definitely want to kind of echo the fact that a lot of these are as Liz pointed out, you know, older white European guys. And so I find that kind of really interesting as well.
And I want to reiterate that these ideas though are sometimes used in amazing ways, like with, especially with like post colonial theory and ideas of liberation and stuff like that, that they can be used in a many many many different ways.
And I think that a lot of what I like to do is kind of use these theories, knowing that they're kind of, you know, 19th century, a lot of the times like from 19th century, kind of like some variety of racist in ways that kind of liberate people for their liberatory aspects.
So yeah, interesting.
Yeah, they are interdisciplinary, like influenced by Marxism, yeah, cultural materialism. Yeah, they also deal with like power, class, and gender, economic relations. Yeah, they are all related.
So each of these figures like, especially, I guess 19th century theorists, like they, like Marx, being a good example, even among the Frankfurt School like the Frankfurt School were all influenced by Marx, whether positively or negatively right whether they
interacted to him or whether they changed his ideas, Marx is kind of, you know, in the family tree Marx is somewhere close to the top right.
And so it's interesting that though we all have different fields.
Some of those figures show up in each of our works nonetheless, right.
It's almost as if like we're getting around this idea of maybe like a genealogy of even the terms here, right. I feel like we're like I feel like we're lifting up the coffins on some of the, some of the theories that theory is built on that.
Right. Right.
All the theory being used in different contexts right like I'm from East Asia and different environment, the social context and difference.
Yeah, yeah.
Interesting. Okay, I'm liking where this is going. So, I've got another related question, but maybe we could just spend a little bit of time on this.
But just to give viewers kind of concrete artifacts to associate with, with the term theory so what what kinds of works. Do you associate with theory and let's talk about like, capital T theory not like, because if we, if we use the lowercase t theory obviously we're going to get arguably, almost every
kind of scholarly product is in some way theorizing right like using theories to explain phenomena, but capital T theory is is maybe a little more specific so what are the texts that you'll associate with that word.
I would say that the text that really got me interested in theory and that really kind of, I guess the first time that I really began to like resonate with this idea and concept was.
It's kind of like it's a post colonial kind of like
I don't know if that's the word escaping me but it's like fundamental to post colonial studies and it's France funnels black skins, white masks. And in that text he's really working through psychoanalytic theory, and he creates this again kind of gave back to this idea of liberation.
He uses psychoanalytic theory to explain the existence of black people, and you know the Western kind of colonized world. And that to me was one of the reasons why I think that you know maybe these ideas are coming from
questionable sources or something but if someone like phenomenon can kind of like you know really build an entirely new and liberated identity from these theories that there might be some power in them.
And so yeah that's I think the first text that really kind of resonated with me on a, I guess I would say a personal intellectual academic like on every level.
Right.
And I just Anthony what you're saying inspires me to think about to how, you know, maybe theory is less a thing and more process, kind of a living discourse, and also that that would speak to the my earlier mentioned issue that some people have a theory that it's sort of associated
with a, you know, particular dominant demographic group and to the, to the detriment of, of the rest of us that, you know, critiques of previous theoretical texts are what theory is built on so that there is this kind of accruing nature to it and I'm just
thinking to have like texts that I work with that are, you know, for example feminist writers like Sarah Ahmed intervening on phenomenology, or, you know, see on nice another writer I work with who's a contemporary aesthetic theorist at working in a feminist
paradigm who will kind of go in and operate on Kant, and there will be this kind of new thing that comes out of the joining of two minds working in from very different historical contexts and experiences.
I feel like the main idea of theory is to it tries to kind of take everything into account like the specificities of context with them trying to generalize it into something that can be applicable for everything.
Well, let's, let's move on to some things I have a quote here that I'd like to share and just, I imagine that will will probably all disagree although maybe, maybe some interesting conversation will emerge from it.
So this is, this is from Stanley fish, a 2008 New York Times article.
And he's talking about the humanities and I think we could apply this to theory.
But he said, he wrote that the humanities don't do anything.
If by do is meant bring about effects in the world.
And if they don't bring about effects in the world that cannot be justified, except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them to the question of what use are the humanities the only honest answer is none whatsoever.
So this is coming from a literary critic, which is interesting. So, do we agree, what do we think about that assessment of things.
Maybe less I'll start with you.
Yeah, I think it's an interesting quote I don't, I don't know too much about Stanley fish so I'm not sure whether we fundamentally agree or disagree about kind of the value of literature in society.
But I'm interested in this quote I don't, I don't need your disagree I think for me, what it brings up is the question of
what, what we mean by use and usefulness utility.
You know, for me to put it in Marxist terms it makes me think of exchange value.
You know I and I, I question that too I bristle at needing to define what I value about literature in terms of what it contributes to
the concept of like profit driven utility, maybe, because I think that that is how we tend to whether, whether consciously or not how we tend to think of the usefulness of, you know, anything things ideas institutions.
Yeah, nowadays.
So, yeah, I mean I do think, you know, there's a version of this quote that I do agree with that maybe if we're asking what is, what are the humanities do what is literature do we're maybe asking the wrong question.
And I do I almost agree to that. I mean, I appreciate the invocation of pleasure. I think that it is for me, largely about experience and process I mean not just on a personal individual level but also in terms of how it connects me with other people
in the community with other people who enjoy, who enjoy things that I do and and enjoy being in conversation about them to me I think that that is an end in itself, that it's, it's fundamentally important and human in a way to be thinking and experiencing
and talking about art and literature so that's kind of my foundational belief for the humanities.
Yeah, one of the things I got from what you were saying this is the this idea that maybe his, his kind of his refusal to defend to jump to the defense of humanities by kind of paving to this.
This standard of like, you know, whatever, whatever is useful whatever's good has to bring about some kind of economic benefit. Right, that's kind of what you're agreeing with here right like if if fishes posture is that we don't have to defend ourselves
we shouldn't have to defend ourselves on that basis.
If that's what he's getting at then I agree. Yeah, having not read the whole article I can't be sure but yes exactly. Right. Yeah. Awesome. All right. Others, what do you think.
I would say that it's very difficult I think to, again, just kind of echo what Liz said it's very difficult and I don't know who Stanley fishes.
And then, but this quote is I think incredibly bombastic which is interesting to me I'm not against kind of you know very, very loud stylistic choices and whatnot, but I do think that what, in some sense, we are trained to do is trying to figure out kind of
what is the motivating force behind, you know, social structures that are much larger than just kind of the individual like this is kind of where I see myself as a critic or as a literary theorist or something like that is trying to, like, I'm really interested in what
is making this person think this about the humanities. And so I guess I really just want to say that in a lot of ways I feel like it is echoing the lack of the lack of that self reflection that I think that the, that, especially with the work that we do, I think
is really front and center, you know, it's really trying to get to the basic part of I guess human action and human motivation and everything like that. And so, and really just trying to expose all the different things, all the different determinants that go into that.
And as you know, where she has been really amazing pointing out that it's very contextual, we're all motivated by different things. So, it's going to look different every time as well. And, I mean, as Liz was saying again I keep I feel like I keep echoing.
That's really enjoyable for me, honestly, I really kind of accept that and I really revel in this idea that you know, I mean I think it's like freedom and like the little F freedom or something like that right like it's humans just doing their thing and figuring
things out, and then we get to kind of like you know, come on the back end and try to, you know, add a little bit more context and add a little bit more nuance to that. So yeah, right.
Yeah. And for me it, it all depends on what is meant by pleasure to write like pleasure.
Well, coming from the classical tradition of their, their base or pleasures and there are
higher pleasures, right and so, and I think pleasure to should be rooted in truth in some way.
And so that's kind of what I think any science should be all about right if you look at the Latin root of science ski India, right a system directed towards coming to the truth of something.
Right.
Yeah. So, yeah, go ahead.
I'm feel worker. I like bring my, my back bad going, just going to the field interview people and the setup living with with people in the village and I just did my field work in Southwest China.
For a month, I just living in a village and every day I wake up and bring bring my backpack and talking with the people living in the villages.
So, so we're in the field, there's so many questions pop out, you're asking why you, why you're working while you're making the food.
What are you wearing today so that's so many things come up.
So, after you get a lot of data and a lot of conversation interview from the field, and you're thinking that is this theory can explain, or you will be guiding the bad theory but more you learn from the field.
Right, right.
Wonderful. Yeah, I like that.
Okay, well, let's, let's end. Um, I have a question that I'd like us to end with.
And that that question stems from a quote from the philosopher, Gilbert rile.
So he has this quip that we, and he's applying this to discourse about method, or we might even say theory.
He says that we run as a rule, worse, not better. If we think a lot about our feet.
I think it's an interesting quote to wrestle with, and to conclude with, and a work of scholarship be to theory saturated.
Yeah, just to hear your thoughts about that. I love that question. Okay, yeah, no, I really love this.
I think it's a really great note to end on so thank you, Jerome for putting this awesome kind of like really generative quotes and stuff together for us.
But I really want to say that this makes me a little bit more happy about theory and about kind of humanism and whatnot, only because I feel like it's coming from a critique of overthinking things, which is like yeah okay, I'm like you know,
I'm kind of like you know a kind of philosopher or a kind of scientist. It's like a scientist has the same anybody who is, as you kind of pointed out is who is in search of a truth or something like that is always in danger of overthinking it, like I feel like this puts me in the
same kind of mold is like you know, heavy kind of like STEM researcher or something like that it's like, well, you're gonna be led really far astray unless you know exactly what it is that you're looking for.
And that's how I approach my own work as well. Like I read a bunch of different texts I do all these different things, but in the back of my mind I'm always looking at the aspect of liberation, you know how can a human being fully kind of be themselves or be
safe, and I don't know why these words are failing me but to be fully kind of in there in themselves. And how can and how is this literature in some sense kind of reflecting a world that that's not possible.
But also, I want to make sure that I mean there are so many different ways that we can do this, just as there are so many different ways of you know, oppressing folks I mean we've all talked about kind of gender theory we talked about sexual theory we talked about
economic theory, there's all these different things all these different forces that are in some sense checking the human so it's like I usually look at the more economic factors.
But this ending on this really does make me feel like I'm in good company, and in a funny way it's like oh yeah, this is something that we might all struggle with all of us who are trying to find some sense of the truth.
Yeah, wonderful. Thanks for that. Yeah, I find the quote super generative I my thoughts on it are still a little bit scattered but it's making me think about
what we've already touched on in terms of the, you know, kind of theory practice distinction mapping onto a mind body distinction.
And I'm also thinking about what where she had just talked about in relation to her field work.
That the truth about things is something that is only accessible through practice right I think theory is something that helps us codify and share those truths but it has to be flexible, and we have to account for historical change, and, you know, all the
particularities that come into any given situation we might be observing and I think so many of those truths are fundamentally embodied. And if we try to solve them or understand them by thinking alone.
It becomes a little bit rigid and reactionary by nature of not responding to actual experience. Yeah, let your feet be free learning from the field.
Yeah, yeah, wonderful.
Well I think that's where we'll, we'll end things thank you all folks for a wonderful discussion.
Thank you. Thank you everyone. This was amazing. Thank you, Jerome for hosting this pilot episode of What does that mean was produced, edited and mixed by Anthony Tello and Liz Vertig.
The next is Jerome Falck episode art is by worship music is by parlay and Galen Huckins. This show was created by Jerome Falck, Liz Vertig, Anthony Tello and worship as part of the winter 2024 podcasting Institute, hosted by the National Humanities
Center, and the San Diego State University Library Digital Humanities Center. Thank you to the NHC and SDSU staff for supporting this project, and special thank you to the voices you heard at the top of the episode which came from interviews with our
friends and family. Thanks for tuning in.