This conception of theory as a model is in fact only possible on peculiarly ideological conditions; firstly that the distance separating theory from the empirical concrete is included within theory itself; and secondly, equally ideologically, that this distance is itself conceived as an empirical distance, and hence as belonging to the concrete itself, which one then has the privilege i.e., the banality of defining as what is always-richer-and-more-living-than-theory. No doubt this proclamation of the exalted status tory burch outlet online of the superabundance of life and concreteness, of the superiority of the worlds imagination and the green leaves of action over the poverty of grey theory, contains a serious lesson in intellectual modesty, healthy for the right presumptuous and dogmatic ears.
Ss an abstract conceptual object and not as a real-concrete object; and that the chapters in which Marx applies the first stages of a historical treatment either to the struggles to shorten the working day, or to primitive capitalist accumulation refer to the theory of history as their principle, to the construction of the concept of history and of its developed forms, tory burch handbags of which the economic theory of the capitalist mode of production constitutes one determinate region. One word more on one of the current effects of this misunderstanding. In it we have one of the origins of the interpretation of Capital as a theoretical model, a formula whose use can, a priori, always be seen as a symptom, in the precise clinical sense of the word, of the empiricist misunderstanding about the object of a given knowledge.
But we are also aware of the fact that the concrete and life may be the pretext for facile chatter which serves to mask either apologetic ends a god, whatever his plumage, is always lining his tory burch boots sale nest with the feathers of the superabundance, i.e. transcendence of the concrete and life or mere intellectual laziness. What matters is precisely the use made of this kind of endlessly repeated commonplace about the concretes surplus of transcendence. But in the conception of knowledge as a model, we find the real and the concrete intervening to enable us to think the relation, i.e., the distance, between the concrete and theory as both within theory itself and within the real itself, not as in a real outside this real object, knowledge of which is produced precisely by theory, but as within this real object itself, as a relation of the part to the whole, of a partial part to a superabundant whole cf. Part One, section 10. The inevitable result of this operation is to make theory seem one empirical instrument among others, in other words, to reduce any theory |of knowledge as a model directly to what it is: a form of theoretical pragmatism.
