Low Theory

Halberstam also shares a set of methodological assumptions with Berlant. Like Halberstam she 'mines' an archive of cultural texts (Halberstam calls his archive the 'silly archive' (a term also derived from Berlant), that are not analysed as cultural symptoms or that are used as examples, but that are embodiments of new sensibilities, new attitudes, different forms of being in the world. 

The book is a defence of what it provocatively calls 'low theory,' a mode of theorizing that Halberstam opposes to the disciplinary rigor of 'high theory.' The book uses sloppiness, silliness, tentativeness, as a strategy. 

Or rather: it is interested in those forms of knowledge that can only be expressed in a silly, non-serious mode.  Modes of knowing that Halberstam calls 'counter-intuitive.' Insights that cannot be expressed in any rigorous way. 

It is interested in the 'flash of insight' that an eruption into laughter may offer, which may be fleeting and unreliable, but it is also liberating. 

This mode of knowing differs from the traditional disciplinary operations of making objects and phenomena legible and classifiable. "Illegibility may in fact be one way of escaping the political manipulation to which all university fields and disciplines are are subject." (10)