The first weeks of the semester can be a blur. They fly by and before you know it, you’re past the syllabus week and into the raw material of learning. From what I’ve learned about myself, these beginning weeks feel as if I have jumped into the pool at the bottom of Wahclella Falls in the Colombia River Gorge and the freezing water has temporarily restricted my ability to breathe, move, and think. This is a dramatization but nevertheless the abrupt initiation usually leaves me wide-eyed and treading water frantically (metaphorically and literally, unfortunately). This semester is no different. Between wrapping up my swim season (GO PIOS) and trying to get my life set up for my senior year, the first weeks of spring semester have indeed been a blur.
Theory is a way to make sense of the blurry world by organizing events, beliefs, and values into coherent and comprehensive “big words.” My narrative about the first several weeks of the semester being difficult might (or might not) be able to be organized into a form of a theory. I could several words of the big and small variety which encompass my experience and label it the Smay Theory of Abrupt Initiation of the Undergraduate. Big words and all, this could be the beginning of a baby theory.
Theory can also account for the blurriness, the overlaps, the lines crossed (the intersectionality if you will indulge a “big word”) in the world. As we explored during our week of quantitative analysis, narrowing down categories of experience and conviction into one or two big words is extraordinarily difficult and some might even argue arbitrary. However, in my academic and personal lives, clear communication has proven to be the most important skill I can think of. Theories, by their nature of being created by words, are a way to communicate something novel in a clear (sometimes), efficient, and accessible way. This does not mean that a translation of Marx is digestible to the average 21st century young person. What I mean is that theories as dense and complex as Marx have the potential to illuminate something about society, people, psychology, and even environment that increases the understanding of a certain situated context.
My initial reflection regarding theory and what exactly it does returns to a concept that we delve into in my studies of Romantic literature in depth: that of perception. Humans experience everything through sensory perception. Sound, sight, taste, touch, and smell. Those five things encompass my entire experience in the universe. These things are biological in that they are located within my body. Your body has these too. Through these inputs, we somehow construct our world, our relationships, our communications, our blog posts, and everything else. Theory is an attempt to generalize and categorize these experiences and perceptions into new perspectives that frame and re-frame how we process and understand our experiences and perceptions. And somehow, even though people are immensely different, we are somehow able to identify at large with some of the headiest and most foundational theories of the academic world. Or maybe we just think we do.
On this note, I would like to acknowledge that theory is often perceived to be the work of dusty academics working diligently indoors with artificial light and old books. And I kind of like that image. However, despite my personal inclination to libraries and big words that have large etymologies, I am excited to learn theory as a “vehicle” that can move me and my environmental studies forward to a different location in the real world of space and time.
The other worry I have is this: as I start thinking about theories and constructivism, what if the entire world becomes completely deconstructed before my very eyes? I find this when studying language sometimes. Words have so many meanings that we create and project upon them that after a few essays on literature criticism, they stop looking real. If the “environment” is everything around me and I’m about to embark on a journey of theorizing about it, will the world feel more or less real in three months? Maybe a little of both?