Here are a few things theory knows today.
Or, to phrase it more fairly, here are a few broad assumptions that shape the heuristic habits and positing procedures of theory today (theory not in the primary theoretical texts, but in the routinizing critical projects of “applied theory”; theory as a broad project that now spans the humanities and extends into history and anthropology; theory after Foucault and Greenblatt, after Freud and Lacan, after Lévi-Strauss, after Derrida, after feminism) when it offers any account of human beings or cultures.
The distance of any such account from a biological basis is assumed to correlate almost precisely with its potential for doing justice to difference (individual, historical, and cross-cultural), to contingency, to performative force, and to the possibility of change.
Human language is assumed to offer the most productive if not the only possible models for understanding representation.
The bipolar, transitive relations of subject to object, self to other, and active to passive, and the physical sense (sight) understood to correspond most closely to these relations are dominant organizing tropes to the extent that the act of dismantling them is framed as both an urgent and an interminable task. This preoccupation extends to such processes as subjectivation, self-fashioning, objectification, and Othering; to the gaze; to the core of selfhood whether considered as a developmental telos or as a dangerous illusion requiring vigilant deconstruction.
Correspondingly, the structuralist reliance on symbolization through binary pairings of elements, defined in a diacritical relation to one another and no more than arbitrarily associated with the things symbolized, has not only survived the structuralist moment but, if anything, been propagated ever more broadly through varied and unresting critique. Such a critique reproduces and popularizes the structure even as it may complicate an understanding of the workings of the binaries mentioned above, along with such others as presence/absence, lack/plenitude, nature/culture, repression/liberation, and subversive/hegemonic.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins”