Have No Theory

The latest issue of e-flux Index, e-flux’s print journal, is oriented around the complex intertwinement of contemporary art and theory. It brings together ninety-three artists, writers, architects, poets, filmmakers, and philosophers to explore the positions that theory occupies in the arts today. This Wednesday, June 24, at Spore Initiative in Berlin (7 pm), this discussion will continue with the artists Hiwa K, Oraib Toukan, Sung Tieu, and Anton Vidokle in conversation with e-flux editors and writers Hallie Ayres, Ben Eastham, George MacBeth, and Elena Vogman.

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Did the Theory Wars take place?1

It is now precisely thirty years since the “Sokal affair” ignited what would become known as the Theory Wars. This was an often-vicious conflagration in print over what the American physicist Alan Sokal termed the “fashionable nonsense” and “secular mysticism” of postwar (largely Francophone) theory, in particular the perceived excesses of social constructionism in science and cultural studies. The first fusillade came when Sokal submitted his notorious hoax paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (an exquisite corpse of quotes from Donna Harraway, Jacques Lacan, Michel Serres, and others), to the social theory journal Social Text, which the editors published in their 1996 issue on the “Science Wars” (though they would later less-than-convincingly protest that they did so as an act of interdisciplinary charity).2 Through its recombinant—if nonsensical—recycling of postmodern mannerism, Sokal’s paper anticipated the turbocharged “stochastic parrots” of today’s LLM slop factories.

In his subsequent Oz-like unveiling of the hoax, Sokal presented his intervention not as one of ridicule, but as the concern of a fellow leftist—an act of “immanent critique” from a left-wing scientist unfashionably partisan to Enlightenment doxa such as truth and objectivity. His critique was most pointedly targeted at the language then in vogue in the critical post-humanities, lamenting the absence of “a logical sequence of thought” in the most celebrated theorists of his day, where in its stead he found only “citations of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald assertions.”3 This minor act of what we’d now term “trolling” intensified an end-of-history war over the intellectual status of Theory in which (to my knowledge) no actual bullets were unleashed, no homes destroyed, or lives lost. It followed from earlier skirmishes such as the polemical correspondences between Roland Barthes and Raymond Picard; Louis Althusser and E. P. Thompson; and the opposition by Cambridge dons to Jacques Derrida being awarded an honorary degree in 1992.

Subsequent guerrilla fronts in the Theory Wars opened up in the 2000s with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s counterproposal of “reparative reading” to what she felt was a pathological dependency on “paranoid reading” in queer theory; James Elkins characterizing art criticism and theory as “writing without readers”; and Bruno Latour asking why (psychoanalytical, feminist, [post-]Marxist, deconstructionist, new historical) critique had “run out of steam” (giving rise to the brief vogue for “post-criticism” associated with writers like Rita Felski).4 There followed Triple Canopy’s Sokalian mock analysis of “International Art English” as a kind of shibboleth, a hermetic form of Denglish speaking in tongues (drawing largely upon e-flux press releases and the writings of October journal), which in turn spurred eloquent defenses of theoretical inquiry in e-flux journal from Martha Rosler and Hito Steyerl.5 And so on and so forth.

As quaint as they may now seem at thirty years distance (under febrile geopolitical conditions that for an increasing share of the world include actual wars, or their looming inevitability), the Theory Wars, and the fissures they opened in the modern academy and wider cultural sphere, supplied many of the (anti-)intellectual coordinates for the “moving right show” under which so many of us have now been living since the mid-2010s. Indeed, the outright refusal of the epistemic mediation of theory seems in retrospect to have defined culture in the 2010s and 2020s: Move fast and break things.6 First thought, best thought. No filter. Immediacy culture. Bomb first, talk later. The late-fascist assault on so-called “gender ideology” and “post-modern neo-Marxism.” The online injunction to “let people enjoy things.” Judith Butler, certainly no friend of Sokal and his comrades, anticipated this tendency in the late 1990s when they wrote that the marginalization of “merely cultural” lines of inquiry under the auspices of restoring left unity could in fact only portend the left’s further weakening and fragmentation.7

The field of contemporary art is itself deeply embroiled in this contestation over the status of theory. While efforts at totally severing art from theory (and putting the post-conceptualist genie back in the bottle) are sometimes still audible—often following the script of Barnett Newman’s sardonic remark that “aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds”—in truth their relationship today seems anxiously avoidant, codependent, and entangled. 

The ninth issue of the e-flux Index (e-flux’s quarterly print journal) interweaves and thematically structures a selection of pieces published by e-flux throughout the summer of 2025, and is divided into two parts. In six chapters that index the state of art and theory today, the first part revisits the primal scene of the Theory Wars—the tenor of which is shown to have changed, from an urgent ideological contest between humanist objectivity and postmodern relativism, to a more even-handed, pragmatic, and pluralist one in the decades since. It brings together material that the various independent publishing arms of e-flux published around the theme of the often-fraught relations between theory and (artistic, architectural, pedagogic, political) practice.

The utility of theory for the arts has also changed, appearing vital in some sectors and marginal in others. On the one hand there is a globalized institutional art world where some species of theory seem ambiently ever-present, and on the other a market-driven sector where being au fait with the writings of Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, and Slavoj Žižek is regarded as an optional extra (if not a strange kink)—but for both, speculation is the principle motor.8 In the world of biennials, Kunstvereins, and MFA programs, contemporary theory informs the lingua franca of “art speak,” while in the catalogs of Christies or in the sales spiel of the booths at Art Basel, the speculative metrology of the market reigns supreme. Becoming reasonably fluent in theory has accordingly now become as often an instrument of professional advancement in the expanded field of creative labor as it is one of political consciousness-raising or the refined elucidation of forms of practice. In this connection the question of the specialization of language, or the risk of febrile ideas ossifying into stale jargon, becomes predominant. Indeed, as Mariam Ghani observed over a decade ago:

If there is a specialized language for art, it circulates among and is refined in the exchanges between these different forms, migrating from the press release to the critical review to the theoretical or historical text to the academic thesis to the artist statement to the grant application to the curatorial text and back to the press release again.

Yet the outlook of the survey of theory today undertaken in e-flux Index #9, which emerges from multiple viewpoints (considering the important relations it bears to arts pedagogy, curatorial practice, the architectural understanding of space, and our understanding of visuality), proves to be far from pessimistic. Indeed, the ground on which several authors converge is that this normalization of the role theory has come to assume for the arts has allowed for a more lucid and patient reflection on both its critical value and its limitations.

As I was editing this issue, two major powers were meanwhile actually at war, locked into a rapidly escalating cycle of butchery and economic and infrastructural destruction in West Asia, spearheaded by the chaoplexic authoritarianism of the United States and Israel on one side (with genuflecting, callow support from their NATO partners), and Iran and its regional allies on the other, leaving millions of civilians in Iran and Palestine and Lebanon, as well as nearby Gulf states, exposed to daily barrages of cluster bombs and ballistic bombardment, and settler violence.9 The second part of Index #9, “This world, this mutilated space,” accordingly moves onto the terrain of the Forever War, examining in its five chapters the resilience shown by artistic communities living on its multiplying front lines, the deepening climate war against the nonhuman world, and those displaced by these processes of destruction. As international relations “realists” have regularly observed on the 24/7 war-pundit circuit since the illegal strike on Ayatollah Khamenei in February, the Iran War is a conflict which also displays no “logical sequence of thought”—which has little to no theory. It is a conflict which serves no obvious national-economic interest for the world’s largest military power, whose casus belli changes by the hour, and whose mediated execution via Truth Social missives so entirely “floods the zone with shit” (to borrow Steve Bannon’s apt characterization of Trump’s media m.o.) that it submerges what its leaders brief today in what they declaimed yesterday (or indeed, this morning). This is a war whose aggressors (Netanyahu–Ben-Gvir and Trump–Hegseth–Rubio) seem less in hock to Carl von Clausewitz than to the instant dopaminergic kill-feed of a fifteen-year-old hooked on Call of Duty missions—with strategy configured as content, war as engagement metric.

In a moment when the fields required to mediate, theorize, and therefore think our way beyond the current polycrisis (or permacrisis—choose your poison) are in a state of existential survival—from the assault on critical humanities programs by the Trump administration to the so-called “cognitive debt” inflicted by the increasing overreliance on LLMs to short-circuit independent thought10—we must continue to affirm the dual pursuits of artistic and theoretical perception, as complimentary endeavours for navigating through and beyond the present conditions. In a moment where cognitive mapping seems more essential (and yet harder to sustain) than ever, it is salutary to end by taking heed of Jaleh Mansoor’s notes on the status of “theory” in the arts, published in the latest e-flux Index:

Theory is the awkward if assertive child of philosophy and art, neither a formally disciplined process of thinking nor a praxis. It is rather a holding zone where a surplus of analysis waits for its moment to act or be acted upon … The way out of this morass of perpetual inventory, a stockpile of language as much as stuff, is through. Any latent part of that accumulation … could be reactualized at any time; it is an arsenal of suspended capacity that could reinject revolutionary time into the homogenous time of cultural recuperation.11