Doing Theory. Towards a History of an Epistemic Practice, 1960 - 1990

In the humanities, but also outside the university, what has been collectively referred to as “theory” since the 1960s has experienced an unprecedented boom—from critical theory to Marxism and (post-)structuralism to the media and systems theories of the 1980s. But now the genre seems to have reached the age of historicization. After a decade of emphatic theoretical work, cultural studies have, since the turn of the millennium at the latest, returned to empirical case studies, favoring “reality” and its narrative reconstructions. And while the boom in theory is also noticeably waning on the book market, leading German theory publishers such as Suhrkamp and Merve have handed over their materials to the archives. Based on this diagnosis, the project proposed here aims to compile a history of theory between 1960 and 1990. A classic approach based on the history of ideas will hardly do justice to this undertaking. Instead, the project draws on recent scientific history, which has learned from the model of laboratory studies to look at the practices, institutions, and media of knowledge: In order to understand the boom in theory between Suhrkamp and Merve culture, between Paris and Berlin, between university and counterculture, the focus is less on the texts themselves than on the conditions under which they were created; the content is less important than the intensity of their historical uses. The project therefore aims—to paraphrase Alexander von Humboldt—to practice “hovering above theories” in order to gain a bird's-eye view of the collective singular “theory” since the 1960s. What epistemic and political motives underlie the boom in theory? Was theory necessary to serve a rapidly expanding publishing and university landscape? What reading practices did it shape? What role did theory publishers and journals play? And how did theory establish and change itself as a genre between science, philosophy, literature, and art?