What is the value of a theory? Who decides such a value? Can it be commonly accepted, commonly held, well understood? What does it achieve to think about the designated value?
Look at advertising effectiveness theory. Two questions revolve around each other in this literature:
Will advertising work?
How will advertising work?
The first question relates, essentially, to growth. Market share. Sales. Conversion, at a stretch. We just want to know if we will be effective and get sales, never mind how... (I am indebted to Colin McDonald for this distinction, expressed eminently well in How Advertising Works.)
The second question relates to practice. Diagnostics. How to make better advertisements. Optimising the making-of-advertising process, the delivered product of commercial creativity. Here we most surely do care how to make the thing work, so as to improve it and make more of it.
Both of these have a definite, defined aim. An end point. That is: changing reality in the long term (advertising in general); or in the short term (the specific advertisement.)
Both of these also focus on how people change brands, rather than on how brands change people. People become consumers; consumers become buyers or considerers. This is about people fulfilling a desired, known function.
Advertising is the tool that brings about these brand-beneficial effects. And advertising effectiveness theory systematises the process and its measurement.
From this perspective, advertising is a clear, intellectualised process, without evident troubles at an epistemological level. Once money has changed hands, and that's shown to have happened, then debate about theory becomes a sideshow, an irrelevance: pedantry.
(There are exceptions, e.g. in political advertising... But I am talking about the majority of advertising effectiveness theory, focussing on commercial effectiveness. However, even in non-commercial advertising, the establishment of proof is the untroubled end point.)
Things are very different in literary theory.
All sorts of arguments and disagreements flourish in literary theory. Everything can be said, until everything and nothing has been said. Indeed, so much can be expressed that even the terms 'literary' and 'theory' are stretched, denied, made unreal.
What is 'literary' anyway? What is a 'novel', a 'poem', a 'play'?
One oldish answer is: they are textual constructs. Words have no inherent meaning... only people give words and expressions meaning. And culture — or history, politics, domination, power struggles — rule beyond the word, within the word, through the word. And such phenomena exhibit themselves in much more than texts; they are also behaviours and actions in society and culture.
'Literature' is one thing among many other things. It can become 'no thing': a thing of no inherent value. You can be influenced by the words on a packet of washing powder as much as by Shelley's lines in Ozymandias.
Literary value, as the subject of literary theory, is variously deconstructed and built up to mean beauty and aesthetic perfectibility. It simply depends on who you ask, and when you do the asking.
And yet, all that literary theorising and sometime negation leads to sudden revivals of intactness; it always does. Literary theory lives another day, is held up to view, shimmering in the sunlight, throwing colours in the air to attract, deflect and mystify.
Is the radical changeability of literary theory due to its value being much less evident than commercial effectiveness? Or more so?
Who has it wrong? The advertising effectiveness theorist, seeing a clear value? Or literary theorists, seeing everything, something and nothing — all at the same time?
The easy answer would be to say: all of them are in part wrong. They are all playing a game, based on rules, and those rules are fundamentally artificial. After all: rules can be changed.
To compare advertising effectiveness theory and literary theory, in order to conclude that the former is epistemologically less troubled, is a way of saying that advertising value is more easily accepted.
But what we are doing, then, is defining levels of acceptability. Disagreement and refusal are possible — here, there and everywhere.
But in truth, I don't know.
Discussions about value are open-ended, at least in principle and often in practice. But me saying such a thing places me in a philosophical position... And even if I am happy with that position now, the adventure of learning, of theorising, is to see things anew. Exactly to shift position.
Is my uncertainty just how it is, when it comes to the value of theory? Or am I simply not far enough, or 'something' enough, to see the universality of such a value? (After all, the truth and reality of a profound value I know and feel and share — but that thrives in a realm outside of theory...)
Right now, I would say: to have the potential to shift theoretical perspective is everything. The potential to create a theory, to outlive it. To make new theories, explore these further, go beyond what I know, here and now.
I instinctively feel that having this potential is better, more magnanimous, gladder, richer.
And yet, I don't know what this potentiality will mean for theory and for the task of theorising.
Could you tell me?
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