Criticism is concerned with evaluation. There may be evaluative principles implicit in this or that form of theory, but theory in and of itself is not prescriptive.

I'm a fan or naysayer like everyone else, not an authority of any kind.

Criticism is concerned with evaluation. There may be evaluative principles implicit in this or that form of theory, but theory in and of itself is not prescriptive.

I make a distinction between theory and methodology, the latter being the practical deployment of a premise. Theory on the contrary may well be applied, hence becomes methodology without a hitch, but isn't necessarily practical at all.

Both the 18th and the early 20th centuries, however, feature brilliant attacks on originality, and it's no doubt one of the hallmarks of romanticism to care about originality and suppose with a sometimes naive spontaneity that it's all that matters.

Although I don't disagree that utterances express desires and try to make complexities precise, I actually don't think at all that any of our efforts to speak and mean things are ultimately why we speak.

I do identify the escape hatch through which Foucault eludes the charge that he himself is an author/authority, hence a tyrant. He establishes the category of "founder of discursivity" for the authors he likes. Slippery, perhaps, but you can see what he means.