but the fact they are finding and funding them doesn’t make the theory wrong in itself, just more likely to be useless.

This is precisely what Rockhill says in the video I posted yesterday: https://hexbear.net/post/8857126. His elevator pitch starts at 7:07.

My approach is always to situate the production of ideas within production more generally, and that implies at least two fundamental principles.

One is that intellectual production is never done in isolation. It is done in a material system of production. Therefore, if we want to understand the intellectual production of any individual (Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, etc.) it is imperative on us to situate that individual production within the overall system that produced both the thinker in question and the work that they produced.

Second is that any intellectual production is the result of a theoretical practice, and we need to analyze that theoretical practice, see how it operates and what it is its fundamental goals are. In the case of French theory, what you have, if we look at it from a larger historical perspective, is that these thinkers became prominent within the imperial core because it was largely driven by the theory industry that developed within the United States in the wake of World War II.

So the fact that people today read Lacan, you know, people like Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze, etc. isn’t because these people are, organically, on their own, individually finding these authors and becoming bewildered at how brilliant they are. It’s because there is an entire system of intellectual production, distribution, and consumption, that has promoted these thinkers as the most important in the world. Given that this system of intellectual production itself is situated within the larger social relations of production, it is necessary, then, to recognize that this is part of an outgrowth of the broader capitalist system.

Rockhill makes a careful and dialectical analysis. It’s kind of like saying pop music is not inherently bad, but it’s not as good as its popularity implies either. You have to account for the record labels, advertising, celebrity cliques, etc.