Liberatory struggle requires claiming theory as practice, not merely critiquing misuse

Evidence

I want to suggest a different metaphor for theoretical work: the metaphor of struggle, of wrestling with the angels. The only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency. I mean to say something later about the astonishing theoretical fluency of Cultural Studies now. But my own experience of theory—and Marxism is certainly a case in point—is of wrestling with the angels, a metaphor you can take as literally as you like. I remember wrestling with Althusser. I remember looking at the idea of “theoretical practice” in Reading Capital and thinking, “I’ve gone as far in this book as it is proper to go.” I felt, I will not give an inch to this profound misreading, this superstructuralist mistranslation, of classical Marxism, unless he beats me down, unless he defeats me in the spirit. He’ll have to march over me to convince me. I warred with him, to the death. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 242 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Instead, my motif is that we must face the situation that we are theorists, for God’s sake, and not immediate practitioners. Theory needs to account for this in some way if it doesn’t want to make the revolutionary action into a deus ex machina and a captatio benevolentiae – ‘well I’m a theorist, but actually I mean practice, so I’m not really a theorist but rather have theory-practice and stand righteously before Lenin even when I don’t have practice’. I think practice is too damn serious for that. Unless there is a truly transparent dialectical relationship between practice and theory, it seems to me that theory has no right to cognitively invoke practice. Instead, it must stand on its own two legs, that is, prove itself theoretically, and in a strong sense at that – this is philosophy, after all. Just because true theory is practice doesn’t mean that theory can already become practice on its own. It can’t claim to be practice and no longer philosophy. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1202 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Possessing a political term does not make one a practitioner of it; Professors can espouse liberatory theory while practicing domination in class; Reading liberatory theory can transform a reader’s political identity through struggle (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• Theory is best engaged as struggle rather than fluent agreement #corroborates (0.85)
• Genuinely held theory requires resistant struggle, not fluent facility #corroborates (0.82) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 242
• Theory must prove itself theoretically rather than gesture toward practice #complicates (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1202
• Self-belief arrives only through organized struggle combining action and reflection #expands (0.78) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 162
• Theory is contested conjunctural knowledge, not will to truth #qualifies (0.75)
• Theory must be endlessly repeated as practice or it atrophies #expands (0.75) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 793
• Ideology must be conceived as a terrain of struggle, not just functional cement #exemplifies (0.73) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 201
• Political struggle is fundamentally waged over the legitimacy of concepts and ideologies #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 577
• Philosophy’s task is resisting the status quo’s suggestive compulsion #responds-to (0.72)