Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
The motto comes from a conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in 1972.
A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It must be useful. It must function.
The line is Deleuze's, though the spirit runs through both men; Foucault called his own books "little toolboxes." I love the formulation for two reasons. First, it strips theory of pretension. A tool earns its place by what it lets you do, not by how impressive it looks on the shelf. Second, it tells you how to choose. You do not need every lens for every job; you reach for the one that fits the thing in front of you. Not a display cabinet of ideas to admire, but a working box you pick up, use, and set down.
A theory, on this reading, is an instrument that changes what you can see. Put a different lens over the same field of practice and different features jump forward; some sharpen, others recede. That matters because naming something "best" is never an innocent act. The label always encodes a judgment about whose practice counts, about what a good outcome looks like, about which context we are quietly treating as the default. Left unexamined, "best practice" smuggles in a whole set of assumptions dressed as common sense. Seeing practice naïvely just means taking the label at face value.
Make it concrete. Say you are mapping practice in some corner of your field and you find a technique everyone in the literature agrees on. Without a lens, you record the consensus and move on. Run that consensus through the questions ethnoautobiography raises and you start asking whose experience produced it, and which voices never made it into the room. Run it through a critical theory of nature and you notice ecological costs the consensus quietly externalised. The practice has not changed. What you can say about it, as a scholar, gets far more defensible.
The seven are arranged as an arc. Ethnoautobiography locates your own standpoint. Humanities theory makes your reading of the field an interpretive act rather than a neutral catalogue. New directions in the humanities gives you continuity plus departure, the logic of genuine innovation. Accelerationism asks about tempo: faster, slower, or redirected? Posthumanism widens the circle of accountability past the human. A critical theory of nature brings capital and ecology into the appraisal. A critical philosophy of AI asks what human judgment must remain irreducible.
Do not try to hold all seven at once. One lens, used well and used honestly, does more for an argument than a shallow nod to all of them. So here is the practice I would hand you: glance at those seven and notice which already feels close to your question, and which feels most alien. Lean toward the alien one. In my experience the tool you did not want is the one that cuts.
The Postmodern Terminal >_