No theory can direct practice, BUT the theorist has an essential role in practice, raising that practice to the level of theory. Practice which is not continually theorized _from the inside_, becomes mere motion.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of shag carpet bomb Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2012 6:48 AM To: lbo-talk Subject: [lbo-talk] not theory
this is interesting. n+1 had a post up about the background behind the n+1 gazette that would come out regularly about zuccotti park. here's a good example of why I think a lot of people who use the word "theory" are really just talking about "thinking" and more often just talking about "thinking correctly." What n+1 describes isn't "theory" in the sense of generalizable, explanatory theory.
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 design-I 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 analyses-Marina Sitrin on the history of horizontalism, Amy Offner on the Harvard living-wage occupation from 2001, Doug Henwood on whether to abolish the Federal Reserve-along the bottom. So, visually, it was, like, practice at the top, and some very interesting theory undergirding it-which 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.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
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