what's worse is that here the idea seems to be that "theory" is a corrective to be applied to the mistaken practice. he writes as if they are two separate things, as if no theory is going on with regard to pratice. In this approach, for instance, Sitrin's discussion of the history of horizontalism and Offner's history of another occupation are "theory". So, if it happened in the "past" - how long ago is an appropriate past, not sure - and its reportage, then it's "theory" rather than just another account of what was happening in practice at the time.
it seems like people want theory to be "sitting around talking about what other people are doing." I certainly appreciated Sitrin's book, HOrizontalism, but it wasn't theory-building in the sense that she could tell us much about general operations - generalizable claims - about social life, social interaction, etc.
"Then our designer Dan O. Williams came up with a brilliant designI had imagined something much more like a newspaper, with kind of static one-page or two-page spreads, whereas Dan O made it really dynamic, in two colors and lots of different type-faces, so that we were able to basically run our reportage of the day-to-day events at Zuccotti in the top half, and then various historical analysesMarina Sitrin on the history of horizontalism, Amy Offner on the Harvard living-wage occupation from 2001, Doug Henwood on whether to abolish the Federal Reservealong the bottom. So, visually, it was, like, practice at the top, and some very interesting theory undergirding itwhich is exactly right."
<http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/881-a-roundtable-with-the-editors-of-occupy>http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/881-a-roundtable-with-the-editors-of-occupy
personally, i disliked n+1's newsletter design. ugh.
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