Detaching Marxist concepts from their political praxis distorts them into decorative analytics.
Evidence
The issue of Marxism is surely not external to these theoretical developments, either in their generality or in the specific texts where issues of colony and empire are foregrounded. In the 1960s and early 1970s, before structuralism and poststructuralism rose to dominance in the Anglo- American academy, many literary critics who wrote about questions of colony and empire did so with some sympathy for the Marxist position even as a Third-Worldist kind of nationalism was often the main inspiration, and an Althusserian kind of Marxism was itself a key moment in the initial impact of structuralism, especially in Britain. … Equally common is the practice of treating Marxism as a method primarily of reading, an analytic of textual elucidation among other such analytics, so that discrete statements or concepts may be lifted out of the political praxis that is implicit in the theoretical unity of Marxism and combined, instead, with statements and concepts manifestly irreconcilable with any conceivable Marxist position. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 31
Categorization
- XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated purpose: Ahmad’s critique of discourse-first, text-only deployments of Marxism parallels Spivak’s own worry about strategic essentialism being read as mere method detached from praxis. — connects to: Poststructuralist concepts drop the ideological dimension that social analysis needs. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 722; Selectively lifting a single concept from a theory distorts its intended political meaning — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 35; Western Marxism shifted Marxist theory away from political economy toward aesthetics and philosophy. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 32
Broader Connections
- Selectively lifting a single concept from a theory distorts its intended political meaning
#corroborates(0.92) — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 35 - Poststructuralist concepts drop the ideological dimension that social analysis needs.
#corroborates(0.78) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 722 - Western Marxism shifted Marxist theory away from political economy toward aesthetics and philosophy.
#exemplifies(0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 32