Had a nice chat on the phone with Tzuchien recently. Several, in fact. In one, I told him I’d been called a nominalist by my friend Nathan, as a mock accusation but fair characterization. Tzuchien said “there’s nothing wrong with that” and recommended I revisit what (little) I’ve read of the realism/anti-realism debates involving Quine and Dennett (or is it Dummett, I forget…) and others, and read the rest of it. Definitely plan to. That stuff is really nice. Clear. Clunky, but in a tweed jacket kind of way. I like that. My friend Colin (who, if anyone cares about some of my aleatory encounters, I met through punk shows in Indiana, we both did zines that I think we’re both partially embarassed of at this point, and it’s through him I met Tzuchien) once said he thought that continental philosophy people fancy themselves prophets and analytic philosophers are bean-counters. Agreed, and the latter’s a nice corrective to the former. (In this same spirit, Angelica’s been listening to a lot of angry teenage bands lately, saying that they’re the antidote to graduate students because they’re concise, straightforward, and unpretentious.) Must remember to add that to the infinite reading list, in the upper third.
Another conversation we had was about a friend of his who is a lefty who is in school for philosophy and is thinking about quitting to go back to doing motorcycle repair. (As an aside, one of my younger brothers, the middle one, the one who’s not a punk rocker, quit highschool last year to do the same thing, or maybe to do computers or tattooing, he changes his mind. I worry about him. A friend from the IWW is in the same situation with his brother. We came up with this analogy to describe our wanting our brothers to go back to school: if you’re organizing in a shop, you recommend to everyone not to show up late to work and not to do drugs in case they demand a drug test. This reinforces some of the repressive elements of the workplace, but in a way that is for the best interests of the people in the shop and which will hopefully in the long term take away some of the power underlying those repressive elements. Same thing with wanting out brothers to get their diplomas. School sucks, but worklife will likely be harder - with the boss in more control - without the diploma.) Anyway, this friend of Tzuchien’s is concerned with the issue of theory and practice, what’s their relationship?
My thoughts on the matter are that that’s not a well worded question. Rather, it’s what’s the connection between some theoretical practices and some other practices, political ones? My own view is that it’s partly private: reading philosophy, like reading literature and history, is an ethical project, a project of self-making where one can unlearn certain bad habits of thought and learn better ones. (A project of teaching oneself certain virtues, in a sense.) This doesn’t recommend reading philosophy necessarily, though, as it applies to other things too.
The other two uses that I think can be made are in analysis and in synthesis. Theory’s analytic moment breaks up things that have been too closely identified. (Freedom requires the state, capitalism is due to human nature, etc.) This disaggregation opens up spaces for thought and acting, for new ethical projects, projects of self-making, and can make visible in a more specific way some of the operations of power (the interests involved in and uses made of things that get lumped together, again like claims about capital/state and human nature). The synthetic moment shows continuities between things that have been posited as disparate. The main example I have in mind is reproductive labor - having and raising kids, housework, sexwork, related feminized activities which are often unwaged or otherwise more or less devalued or obfuscated activities. Positing these as work opens up possibilities for aggregation along lines of class, for acting in concert against shared enemies.
One caveat to all of this, of course, is that ‘theory’ and ‘academy/university’ are in no way coterminous but rather are independent of each other. Movements think, organizing is evidence of thought and theorizing. That move, disaggregating academy with theory seems to undermine much of the theory/practice problem from the get go. Unions have theory (and practical know-hows), so do businesses and the state (much of v1 of Capital is spent reading some of the theory of the enemies, in order to understsand, criticize, and conspire against them). The relationship between paid academic work and meaningful theoretical practice is one that I’m rather suspicious of and doubtful over. I think it’s likely that it will be mostly of the private ethical variety (which is not necessarily individual, as private lives involve people one is close to, though I suspect that academic theory’s ethical moment will also have its collective possibilities limited). That’s still valuable, but should not be mistaken for the sum of theory, or for any necessarily better theory. Probably the reverse,
given its general disconnection from extra-university circles.