Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 12:25:33 -0700
Subject: Re: postcolonial "Theory" - location of Theory and contexts of


I can't remember who said something about which parts of a theory we pick 
up and which part we don't...but I think it is relevant here....

The relationship between poco and french post structuralists is such a good 
example....while the french haven't been the only ones to go throught this 
process, the french theorists have probably provided us with the most 
comprehensive archive of the progression of 
enlightenment/revolution/republicanism/colonialism/postcolonialism that 
"we" need to read them as a means of understanding aspects of the 
development of structural relationships and the transformations of the same....
French theorists have been in the publicly unique position to revisit 
themselves in various states...I think of de Gaulle, the resistance fighter 
and Allied liberator standing on the podium in Quebec and proclaiming Vive 
le Quebec Libre....and all that happened in between and since in 
France...the birthplace of the democratic experiment and wonder why anyone 
would consider the french post structuralists irrelevant...

French theorists have had such "wonderful opportunities" to encounter 
aspects of "themselves" that permits a type of reflexivity that doesn't 
seem to have happened for others as systematically....which is probably why 
institutionalized theory comes from such sources since the relationship 
between the individual and the collective is at the heart of this 
systematicity....a result is what I would call a vertically integrated body 
of theory (law, psychiatry, sociology, art & literary theory, etc.) that 
provides the means to explore fields of content....

I my opinion we use theory in our practice either unconscious or 
consciously...informally practiced family scripts can be easily formalized 
as theory, Piercian informal logics can be seen as formal pragmatics that 
are readable as theory...when I think about marketing theory and how 
effective it is at tapping into consumer trends.......so effectively that 
it seems we are defined by what we consume rather than by what we 
produce.....we can't afford to practice atheoretically
...as r observed...the theory/practice binary is bogus....the issue is, in 
my opinion, how this "binary" works on the ground(s)..so that the "field 
adjustments" become important and integral parts of any theory/practice 
dialectic.  This requires incredible amounts of work...because the 
relationship is reflexive...foregrounded by the participants and 
backgrounded by the context...(or vice versa depending upon the perspective)
a problem is of course that the number of variables in the field of inquiry 
becomes immense....and a bloody lot of work....like reflexive ethnography 
for ever

I recall one of the profs for whom I TA ed who never got tenure before she 
retired teaching, in her final years she looked at holographic theory...I 
think she was just ahead of her time...but her students acted brain dead 
because they couldn't do the whole-part thinking that she demanded of them 
because it required so much information as a base that the term came and 
went before they even had a clue of what she was talking about....any of 
them were asian and her cultural base was pure americana....

but when we do part-whole thinking it becomes 
essentializing/reductionist...we need to be able to do both but the level of
information even languages needed to do it effectively is mindboggling....

me, I am going back to FN mythology with systems theory to look at everyday 
activity in political contexts because I agree that there is the danger 
de-politicizing the practice...

Is anyone familiar with Archer's Realist Social theory: The morphogenetic 
approach. Cambridge 1995....off line is fine...



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