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The Uses of Theory

  
 
illmatic
14:09 / 30.10.03
Following a cue from Bengali in Platforms over in the “Deleuze & Bodies” thread, I’d like to ask how people perceive the relationship between theory and their lives? What understanding have of self or of wider life have been changed by theoretical perspectives? Is this the purpose of theory, if indeed it has one? And is their an ideal balance or position to aspire to? I don’t really know what I’m trying to get at here, so help me out – it’s just that there is something brought up by the seeming contradictions of Deleuze’s life and the idea of trying to explore your body through the mediations of theory. I can understand there’s socio-philosophical conceptions of the bodybeing explored here, but do these really connect with US and our experience?

Also, which theorists seemed to exemplify a fusion of life and praxis? Dread Pirate Crunchy over in t’other thread is arguing that Deleuze doesn’t seem to have the positive relationship to the body that one might anticipate - I’m aware a little of the details of Foucault’s life and he seems to have been working on both fronts to some degree (waiting for a slapdown here from someone who knows better). Wilhelm Reich might be a possible candidate. Strictly speaking he’s not a theorist - he believed himself a scientist dealing with empirical physical facts, but he certainly blurred the window between psycho-analytical ideas and his real life – the “internal structures of oppression” mentioned by Mister Disco in the other thread might serve as an exact parallel to Reich’s “character armour”. I’m also quite inspired at the moment by a new book called “Talking Anarchy”, a series of interviews with anarchist Colin Ward, (can’t find a link, goddamnit). He’s a former architect and city planner and his professional career has been driven by an anarchist perspective – for instance, in trying to advocate the dweller control and ownership in housing, or arguing for the benefits to children of being able to explore the urban environment. He’s a really inspiring figure and I’d like my professional career to have the same degree of relevance and coherence with my beliefs.

I realise I slipped here from talking about relations to the body and experience to people’s professional careers. I’d welcome speculations on the convergence of either of these with theoretical perspectives. I’ve certainly put my own life/philosophy together from a bundle of ideas, (unfortuately still lacking in the execution in some parts) but more about this below, perhaps.
 
 
Cat Chant
15:31 / 31.10.03
A couple of, hopefully discussion-provoking, examples of theorists whose practice demonstrates an interesting relationship between what you called "life" and "praxis":

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Teaches in a Comparative Literature department at Yale (I think - possibly Columbia? Prestigious US university anyway). Persistently advocates the systematic, in-depth teaching of literature from other narrative or artistic traditions than the European. Teaches basic literacy to village children in the Indian sub-continent during her summer vacations: which could indicate an attempt at persisting in two different political-pedagogical tactics for changing the system of privilege, or could just indicate confusion.

Jacques Derrida. Philosopher. Writes, lectures on, and teaches philosophy. Presumably thinks that theory is important enough for him to devote his life to it, without having to 'justify' it by having recourse to an unthought opposition between 'political' activism outside the academy and 'theoretical' activity inside the academy.

Will get back to you on the body and the relationship between theory and experience later - but in the meantime, do my bodily reactions to theory count? Getting so excited by reading Derrida that I have to get up and dance? Does theory have to have a purpose beyond itself - more than music or art or any of the other forms that cultural thinking takes?
 
 
Disco is My Class War
06:27 / 01.11.03
Whoa, big topic! But a good one...

Also, which theorists seemed to exemplify a fusion of life and praxis? Dread Pirate Crunchy over in t’other thread is arguing that Deleuze doesn’t seem to have the positive relationship to the body that one might anticipate - I’m aware a little of the details of Foucault’s life and he seems to have been working on both fronts to some degree (waiting for a slapdown here from someone who knows better)>

Perhaps I should be posting this in the other thread, because really it's a question I could direct to Crunchy, but I'm not sure that Deleuze could have had a 'positive' relationship to bodies, or his body in particular. Like Bataille, for instance: Bataille did a lot of work around the abject and disgusting things tha bodies produce and are produced by (shit, piss, seminal fluid, blood etc) and the various techniques of the body that could connect one to 'primordiality' or madness or political subversion. And obviously Bataille did have a pretty interesting and varied sexlife. But does this mean he had a 'positive' relationship to his body? Bataille, to me, seems to have been far more interested in finding and crossing the limits of bodies (ie death) which, you'll agree, is not necessarily either liberating or positive. On the other hand, look at Nietzsche, who invented the philosophical lifestyle: he said philosophers should drink tea instead of coffee and have a particular diet 'for the mind'...

I am in the middle of reading a biography of Lacan at the moment, and it appears that not only was he quite mercenary in his quest for intellectual fame, but privately he was a complete nut. He divorced his first wife after having three children, and they both agreed not to tell the children he'd moved out: so he had to cover for around eight years by pretending to be 'on business trips'. In fact he was raising another child with his new partner (who, coincidentally, was Sylvia Bataille, Georges' ex.) He was dishonest, infantile, rude and lacked social skills, and yet he was also one of the first theorists to 'discover' that meaning had no relationship to a predetermined 'reality'.

Anyhow, less arguing about various French philosophers' sexlives and more answering the question. Theory to me doesn't occupy a programmatic or ideological position: ie, I read something and decide I must live by the rules it sets out. It's a set of tools, some of which are useful and some of which aren't at different moments. And I'm not a 'workman' in the Levi-Strauss sense of 'bricolage' because the tools are not all about doing work, some of them are toys. Or all of them are toys. And sometimes playing with the toys makes me wanna dance, too.
 
 
Sobek
01:56 / 02.11.03

Speaking personally, that stuff plays no role in my life whatsoever.
 
 
Jackie Susann
21:31 / 02.11.03
Mine either.

Now I feel like I'm being painfully misrepresented but I won't go on about it except to say I think Deleuze is being hard done by here - it's not that his life was in contradiction with his theory, but that his theory didn't say what I thought it said. I think there's a pretty good case for saying the two resonated together pretty effectively - although obviously, attacking that binary was part of 'both' projects.

I think this is the basic problem of the way the question's been phrased; once you're looking for symmetry between life and work, you've imposed a division you can't help finding again. To take a Deleuzian line, you're approaching the question in an arborescent way, looking to rediscover a lost unity. When really it's a matter of intrinsically mixed multiplicities; elements of thought and life combined in heterogeneous tendencies, moments, haecceities...

Also, I think Derrida does do (or at least did do) a fair bit of activism. Not in a chucking molotovs from the barricades sort of way, but in a doing-quite-a-lot-for-a-nice-liberal-professor sorta way. To finish with a tangential anecdote, Derrida once taught a class of Canadian kindergarten students. A couple of postgrads had spent a few weeks going through some of his books with the kids, and then Derrida came and sat on the floor and answered their questions. His favourite was 'How much time do you spend thinking? And what are you doing when you're not thinking?' He said he would be thinking about it for weeks.
 
 
No star here laces
06:49 / 03.11.03
Probably tangential and/or missing the point, but...

On "understanding of self or wider life changed by theoretical perspectives".

I've always found most theory/philosophy to be fascinating and involving on an abstract level. But I also believe there is a world of difference between 'knowing' or 'understanding' something on that abstract, intellectual level and having it cross over to affect the way that you actually behave in everyday life and the choices that you make.

There is a distinction, I feel, between the part of the mind that manipulates concepts and ideas and the part that governs what we actually do with our time on the planet. I understand and even aesthetically appreciate Foucault, but do not feel that it has ever moved me to change much of the way that I act.

There are a couple of exceptions, but for me at least, they tend to be writers who articulate something that I have always felt to be true. Erich Fromm is the best example I can think of in that his analyses hit me squarely in that sweet spot between what is obvious to me personally and what I had never considered or looked at in a certain way. And I feel that reading Fromm (which I do regularly) does change the way I act because of this - it certainly changed my entire approach to relationships. I suppose another quality he has, and which is so crucial in this kind of area is his clarity of expression and ability to make things simple. You need that kind of simplicity to apply abstract thinking to your actual life.

Perhaps the trouble with a lot of theory in this respect is that it is far too overtly clever in its aims and analyses, thereby removing it from the everyday. Again, one of the things I love about Fromm is that in some of his work he covers very similar territory, and comes to similar conclusions as Kahlil Gibran, someone who is coming from a very different perspective, using very different means...
 
 
illmatic
10:15 / 03.11.03
Thanks for the intelligent and tolerant response to a question which I now think was a bit ill thought out and stupid. I felt like I wasn’t quite sure what I was trying to get at. Hopefully, my first post comes over as quite tentative, and people have or will get something constructive out of it. I have anyway.

*shuffles embarrassed around Headshop, looking at floor*

Might have been better phrased as a straw poll of how people react to, or feel they are using, theory, as opposed to trying to assert some sort of idealised unity of activism and accompanying philosophy.

Anyway, to address Deva’s point above: “Does theory have to have a purpose beyond itself - more than music or art or any of the other forms that cultural thinking takes?”.

I don’t know. I suppose that music or art can have a solely aesthetic function while theory seems to me to be more about arriving at new understandings, articulating perspectives in new ways. I suppose “good” artistic, musical or whatever kind of cultural products do this as well. I can see how these understandings when applied to say , gender, might help to produce a very different self-understanding that fits and explains our experience in a more congruent way. I think that ‘Laces has maybe hit on some of the things that I was trying to say with regard to Fromm. (Question - is Fromm’s work specifically orientated toward relationships?) There’s a number of writers who I have similar feelings toward, in that they both articulate something I feel to be true, but put in a broader perspective for me, which also offers me the possibility of changing or challenging my actions and feelings. Obviously, theory in some areas won’t have this personal applicability. Different tools for different functions to use MD’s phrase.

In part some of my reaction above comes from reading lots of magickal material where I’m always looking for use and utility value, and reject perspectives which seem to head away from our experience. (Naming no names with regard to the Magick Forum). Perhaps I’m conflating the two areas in a way that’s counter-productive.
 
 
Quantum
12:27 / 03.11.03
I don't think so, I think the relation of theory and practice stretches beyond the Magick.
I have a pretty simple perspective, I use theory like a radar or a map- to inform and guide practice. Theory without the corresponding practice has value of course, but the most interesting theories are the ones you can apply.
Having said that, I'm a theory bitch, I like to examine the fundamental (and thus more abstract) aspects and implications of ideas, so although I see theory as the foundation of good practice that foundation may have no possible application- just implications that lead to applications.
To separate theory and practice too much leads to hypocrisy or inactivity.

Remember too that your practice will inform how people see your theory- I don't like Kant because he was anal retentive and died a virgin, so unadventurous local housewives would set their clocks by his habits. I do like Feyeraband because after his lectures he'd leap out of the window onto his motorbike and ride away. Although I form my opinion mostly on their ideas, the reports of their behaviour (and the implications about their personalities) affect my opinion as well.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
18:41 / 03.11.03
Thought it might be useful to requote Ill's question:

'is there a contradiction between theorising about the body and experiencng the body" or something along those lines. I suppose this question comes down to what you see the purpose of theory being, and what uses and applications it has in your life.

I'm interested in Deva's notion of theory as cultural product, not sure if I agree entirely.

What interests me here is how Theory seems to become this monolithic entity, and is at the same time a very vague term.

Ie, there are many types of theoretical project, and defining defining what Theory actually *is* is tricky, IMO.

Do we mean critical theory? philosophy? what is 'that stuff'

Perhaps the only USP that theory has is that it's not practice. But does that neccessarily mean that it's not experiential?

Am just asking questions atm as i'm finding it incredibly hard to get a handle on this, but think there's an interesting thread to be had here.

arrrrggghhh....not waving, drowing...


Another approach: some theory that works for me:

person-centred therapeutic theory, I use it, and it's done what it says on the tin... It's given me new ways to listen to my clients, and new insights into my own life and actions. But then to an extent, for me, I can't read this stuff without on some level 'doing' it, so this kind of theory functions performatively for me.
 
 
Cat Chant
16:08 / 09.11.03
Illmatic, this is a lovely thread, stop shuffling embarrassedly and do a dance of pride.

Can't resist showing off a random thing that i know, though:

I'm not a 'workman' in the Levi-Strauss sense of 'bricolage'

A bricole was originally a war catapult: perhaps what you're not is a soldier, Mister?
 
  
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