Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

attempting to make room for the excluded and
disempowered, the theorist continues to occupy a
privileged place indistinguishable from the
scientist's role as an objective observer, or from
the philosopher's pretensions to pure reason. [...]
Far from breaking with the legacy of colonization,
this arrangement has simply reinstated it with a
vengeance, so that the grandchildren of the Asian and
African subjects who began their schoolday paying
homage to 'our forefathers the Gauls' now bone up on
Derrida or Foucault. (899, emphasis mine)
The portrait that Spellmeyer paints here through his appraisal
of “theory” – again, his critique focused upon the use of
“theory” by its “successors” rather than anything inherent to
“theory” itself – is that same counter-polarization that
Knoblauch had himself warned against. The verge of reversal is
that “a boundary between 'ignorance' and 'knowledge,'
mystification and enlightenment” and assuming that “privileged
place” as the bearer and keeper and missionary of that Post-
Modern “Word,” those “successors” have indeed become the
preachers and the popes of that new “theology,” as Knoblauch had
called it, of Uncertainty. And their standing as such has been
assured by their criticism and scholarship and the abstractions
and abstruseness therein, their work bringing them that very
same order, stability, authority, and control, at least within
the world of academia. And this is all in the name of
Uncertainty, which, at least for me, is an utterly ironic thing.
But it is a grievously unfortunate irony because its
consequences are not suffered by those like me – fellow
composition instructors and composition scholars – but by
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