poverty of theory

At some time during those first few weeks it hits me that nothing in my head has remotely equipped me to deal with the realities I am encountering. Least of all anything I learned in my first year at university. My concepts are irrelevant, my images awry. Words lose their grip. The quarter-tones in an old woman's voice, quavering to a harmonium in a language I don't understand, move me inexpressibly. A sitarist picks up the refrain of Colonel Bogey from a car horn in the street outside, weaves it into his raga, and my world — First World, Second World, Third World — unravels.

Anamneses

As Marc Bloch once remarked, it is no bad thing the facts are there to remind us that society is not a geometric figure. Theory should be abandoned if it gets in the way of knowledge. In the case of historical materialism, I believe, we are better off without the familiar landmarks, for all too often they turn out to be mere Potemkin's villages: impressive facades which block the view. 'Traditional historical materialism' all too often theoretically pre-empts what can only be historical questions and should never have been treated as anything else. Marx himself would have had little truck with such 'theoretical bubble-blowing' — though that is neither the only, nor the best, reason to leave it behind. But a last reminder of irascible Old Nick's impatience with the poverty of philosophy will not, perhaps, go amiss:

When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever ... On the contrary, our difficulties begin when we set about the observation and the arrangement — the real depiction — of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or the present ...

The Violence of Abstraction