Theory must prove itself theoretically rather than gesture toward practice

Evidence

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Adorno’s position: the unity of theory and practice claim does not license theory to abandon its own philosophical rigor.
• XREF: connects to: Truth of a theory is independent of either its productivity or its non-application; The failed transition from theory to practice forces the interaction back into theory. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1209; Physicalism reduces scientific theories to formal systems of signs for application — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 60 (+6 more)