Summary
Edward Said’s term for how theories move to other times and situations: in his earlier “Traveling Theory” essay they lose original power and are tamed; in essay 37 of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, “Traveling Theory Reconsidered”, he adds a transgressive mode in which a later reader refuses the original’s reconciliation and the theory flames out into a new site (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.408-410).
Details
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The original example is György Lukács’s theory of reification in History and Class Consciousness: picked up by Lucien Goldmann in Paris and Raymond Williams in Cambridge, its insurrectionary force was shed and it became an interpretive device (PDF p.408-409).
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Theodor Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik is a traveling theory gone tougher, harder, more recalcitrant: Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method reasserts the impossibility of the synthesis Lukács’s subject-object compromise promised (PDF p.411-414).
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In Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth the subject-object dialectic is grounded and actualized in the colonial situation — the primacy of geography in history, then of history over consciousness — while Fanon is deliberate about its limitations: the two zones follow “the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible” (PDF p.415-417).
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The essay’s conclusion (PDF p.418-421) answers its closing question negatively: Fanon does not consummate the subject-object dialectic in violence — nationalism is a necessary but far from sufficient condition for liberation — and restates the point of theory as travel itself: “The point of theory therefore is to travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense in exile.” Adorno and Fanon are not belated borrowers but pull Lukács into actively different locales, an affiliation in the deepest sense.
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, György Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Frantz Fanon