Alchemies of Theory

In this article, I'd like to explore alchemy as a metaphor for the state of Theory in the neoliberal university today, as a metaphor for the desires and dissatisfactions swirling around in debates over Theory. Alchemy serves as a powerful figure both for theory's transformative power, its resistance to selling out, and also for the affective investments driving the turn away from theory, the turn away from skepticism and critique, in search of more consumer-friendly products, in search of products taken almost as magical stones that will generate and legitimize the knowledge we need, as individuals and communities, to tell us our future.

Alchemy—the semi-scientific, semi-mystical search for gold and the elixir of long life—strikes me as a particularly apt figure for thinking through what it means to sell or sell out theory because alchemy sits at the border between the calculable and the incalculable, between the reproducible and formulaic on the one hand, and the magical and unpredictable on the other. Alchemy, it seems to me, helps name features of neoliberalism that are concerns for theory, such as the intensified commodification of education and knowledge, but it also helps name developments and dispositions within theory itself, in particular the turns to ontology, realism, new materialisms, and (re)enchantment that have emerged in response to these concerns. Alchemy has long served as a figure for quantification and commodification in critiques of capitalism. In Capital, Karl Marx used the metaphor to describe the process by which "everything becomes saleable and purchaseable," by which even the "bones of saints," become transformed into gold, that is, into money, the "radical leveller" through which "every qualitative distinction between commodities is extinguished" (1976, 229). Stephanie Smallwood points up the perverse process by which humans themselves are converted into commodities in the slave trade through this alchemy of devaluation and revaluation, as slaves' human pricelessness is denied and their social worth converted into economic worth, into currency, a number, a price tag (2007, 63). Pierre Bourdieu similarly deploys the metaphor to describe the conversion of economic capital into symbolic capital, highlighting the "social alchemy" involved in "the transformation of arbitrary relations into legitimate relations, de facto differences into officially recognized distinctions" (1977, 195). Alchemy in these uses figures the material transformation of social value and social property into private property; the ideological determinations of equivalence and value at work in that transformation; and the arbitrary or reversible character of a process dependent on belief rather than essential, immutable properties.

Yet this picture of alchemy does not exhaust its potential or its politics. If alchemy's social magic means mutability, a susceptibility to change, it is also in this sense that critics have deployed the metaphor of alchemy conversely to name resistance to commodification, resistance to calculation, and resistance to the constriction or deadening of human experience. In Patricia J. Williams' work, alchemy serves as a metaphor for the struggle against the inertia of history, the process by which enslaved, denigrated life is brought into the bounds of the human, the process by which absence is transmuted into presence, something is made out of nothing, racial categories transformed, and effaced pasts given new flesh. Alchemy emphasizes the material processes at work in transmutation, as well as the immense effort, the high heat of the fire, required to shift law and custom. In the French, alchimie also names the power of the word to transform the banality of reality into poetry, to creatively re-envision and re-theorize, to see and live differently.

If theorists can be described as alchemists today, what are we purporting to transmute into gold? What is being transformed and elevated? What alchemical myths or visions are we buying into? What are or should we be selling? In what follows, I'd like to consider two intertwined dimensions of theory today: the experience of disappointment and baseness motivating a search for reenchanting modes of apprehending and living in the world, and the temptations of calculation, the desire for an effective elixir and the investment in the search to find it.

A sense of present urgency marks much of...