Theoretical Thinking on the Fault Lines of Theory, Commonsense, and Reform

Starting from critical responses to both the series of debates on the “death
of theory” in Western academia and the latest efforts in Taiwan to rethink
the conditions of local (re)production of knowledge, this essay reflects on the
current status of “theory” in Taiwan by reexamining the historical context in
which “theory” was first introduced, disseminated, and appropriated by local
intelligentsia in the early years of post-martial law Taiwan. The relentlessly selfproblematizing
penchant in Western theory and the urgent call for reform in
the greater socio-political milieu converged to give rise to the “theory boom”
in Taiwan in the 1990s, thereby rendering the dominant strain of theoretical
thought a “reformist discourse.” It is on account of theory’s potential for being
a reformist discourse within and outside the academy that we should rethink
the relationship between theory and its unlikely ally, common sense. Taking
my cue from Gramsci’s somewhat paradoxical conception of the continuum
between common sense and theory, I argue that theory emerges from the
inherently porous, inconsistent, even contradictory field of common sense.
Rather than suturing the latter’s constitutive fissures, theory should perform
the difficult task of “witnessing” the history of the present—the often forgotten
meaning of theoria—on their intersecting fault lines.