The core problem with what I term avant-garde theorising is the valorsation of conceptual novelty: the idea that new vocabulary will always, or often, be a positive thing which expands our capacity to describe emerging realities. In contrast I think it too often involves a succession of turns, leaving the theoretical enterprise spinning on the spot, increasingly unmoored from a rapidly changing reality. It’s a disposition in response to change which is just as flawed as asserting that our present vocabulary is necessarily adequate to a new reality.
This account by Stephen Mitchell of Hans Loewald‘s extension of Freud captures what an alternative approach can look like:
So, rather than finding new words to convey new insights, Loewald nestles his innovations carefully within the old words, giving birth to new meanings while attempting to preserve resonances with a deep past.
Psychoanalysis at Its Limits, Pg 183
How can transform ‘the old words’ from within, reaching for new ones when this project cannot go any further, rather than immediately reaching for novelty? This is the question which captures my theoretical sensibility, which I would argue serves a methodological function in coping with the intensification of social and cultural change.
Mark Carrigan 