Revisionism neutralizes a theory by deleting its praxis-demanding content

Evidence

I myself understand revisionism as the act of making a theory comfortable and palatable by leaving out whatever calls for praxis or change, whatever is likely to be painful for the purely contemplative intellectual consumption of a middle-class public: thus the revision of Freud quietly suppresses what we may call his materialistic foundation, namely, the insistence on the plainly sexual etiology of personality disorders. Marxist revisionism since Bernstein has similarly involved the elimination of the notion of class struggle as such; and the reader will evidently have to make his own judgment as to such tendencies in the present work. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 21 (#expands, via linked claim)

This was when he convinced himself that literary quality control was bourgeois self-indulgence; only the cause mattered, and it was a sin to revise or even to reread. He filled sheets with ink while Beauvoir, a painstaking reviser herself, watched nervously. Sartre churned out essays, talks, philosophical works — occasionally with help from Cau, but mostly alone. His bibliographers Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka calculated that, over his entire life, he averaged twenty pages a day, and that was of completed work, not drafts. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 844 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

No doubt this paradox is partly the result of the ambiguity of the verb to be—as though it meant something to say that someone “is” a Marxist or an existentialist or whatever. The more basic explanation is, however, that Marxism takes as its object something utterly distinct from the object of the more academic philosophical systems; that there can be no contradiction (even where the exact relationship of the two remains to be worked out) because two wholly different types of reality, which each mode of thought properly governs, miss each other in midair, as it were, fail to intersect at any point. “We were convinced,” says Sartre of his generation, “at one and the same time that historical materialism furnished the only valid interpretation of history, and that existentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality.” Marxism is a way of understanding the objective dimension of history from the outside; existentialism a way of understanding subjective, individual experience. The “search for a method” therefore does not take the form of a reconciliation of contraries, but rather of a kind of unified field theory in which two wholly different ontological phenomena can share a common set of equations and be expressed in a single linguistic or terminological system. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 423 (#builds-on, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Anglo-American empiricism blocks political connection-making by isolating individual facts; Marxism and existentialism govern wholly different, non-intersecting realities — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 423; Revisionism makes theory palatable by suppressing whatever demands praxis, notably class struggle. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 21 (+2 more)

Related

• Revisionism makes theory palatable by suppressing whatever demands praxis, notably class struggle. (similarity 0.88)
• Sartre rationalized abandoning revision as politically virtuous (similarity 0.81)
• Marxism and existentialism govern wholly different, non-intersecting realities (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Revisionism makes theory palatable by suppressing whatever demands praxis, notably class struggle. #expands (0.95) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 21
• Sartre rationalized abandoning revision as politically virtuous #exemplifies (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 844