Kim jest teoretyk?

Abstrakt

Irit Rogoff gives the following answer to the question posed in the title: “A theorist is one who has been undone by theory”. Her analysis is embedded in Visual Studies on one hand, and in post-colonial and globalization discourses – on the other. The condition we are now in, the visual culture, she explains as the condition of being ‘without’ – the state of simultaneously knowing and being unable to know. She describes the shift from criticism to critique to criticality, where criticism is understood as an act of judgment addressed to a clear cut object of criticism, the application of values and judgments based on naturalized beliefs and disavowed interests; critique is as examination of those assumptions, values and thought structures that have sustained the inherited truth claims of knowledge. Criticality in her account would be the latest phase of cultural theory and would consist in emphasizing the present, moving from causes to effects, from revealing faults to the possibilities of actualizing the potential. But the most important shift Rogoff describes is the move from the sanctioned subject for theoretical activities towards the constitution of a subject for the work, or substituting the historical specificity of what is being studied with the historical specificity of who is doing the studying. It results in a different way of writing about art, which becomes a practice of writing with an artist’s work rather than writing about it. Rogoff also recognizes theoretical possibilities connected to introducing the notion of Creolisation in order to provide more complex and more appropriate modes of cultural engagement.