Theory is assumed abstract the more it drags away from the personal
Evidence
The personal is theoretical. Theory itself is often assumed to be abstract: something is more theoretical the more abstract it is. To abstract is to drag away, detach, pull away, or divert. We might then have to drag theory back, to bring theory back to life. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 288
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- QUESTION: Ahmed’s etymology of ‘abstract’ as drag-away is the theoretical counter-definition Kornbluh quotes as immedia’s enemy; worth tracking how Kornbluh rebuts or concedes it in her own defense of mediation.
Related
- Autotheory posits lived experience as theory’s proper basis. (similarity 0.85)
- Antitheory abandons abstraction, distance, generalization, and futurity (similarity 0.84)
- Theoretical abstraction itself functions as a form of cultural mediation. (similarity 0.83)
- Theory’s defining political value is the distance it effects from the immanent (similarity 0.82)
- Theory and art must depart from context rather than dissolve into immediacy (similarity 0.82)
- Theory’s essential promise is departure from whatever is merely given (similarity 0.81)
- Mediation’s residual forms still create impersonality and objectivity against privatizing subjectivism. (similarity 0.78)
- Contemporary theory has resolved the old mediation question decisively toward immediacy (similarity 0.78)
- Theory and immediacy are defined by mutually opposed spatial relations to the situation (similarity 0.78)