Two pieces of writing that are on my mind at the moment. The first by a friend of mine, a near-accidental product of long and difficult meditations on the relationship between theory and practice, theory and knowledge, theory and reality. The other by Thompson, in The Poverty of Theory, his passionate vindication of historical knowledge and knowing. The two citations aren’t about the same thing, but I think they speak to and with each other. They do for me – long live the reader!

In Defiance

The word reality has been hounded out of language. Unless qualified by ten adjectives, twenty clarifications, and the customary footnotes signalling awareness of all theories of discursive deconstruction, its best left out of all projects of research. What is real? Is there a reality outside subjectivities? Can that reality be approximated, be represented? Is re-presented reality still original/real? And what is original anyway?

But what are we really talking about? The limits of process, experience, sensation or the limits of language in expressing it? Surely, pain is real. The rifle butt descending upon an unarmed protestor- it seems obscene to reduce it to an image. Real pain, with real consequences of blood and mashed bones, of dead and mutilated bodies. Surely, absence is real. The absence of food in the stomach, of money in the wallet, of blood in veins? And surely work is real- shapes conceived in air, given form through flesh and blood- real hands, wielding real tools giving shape to matter- welding, beating, burning, shaping, moulding or cutting- until ideas take shape in matter.

So when did we surrender? When did life surrender to the doubts of its voyeurs? When did the speakers start stammering in consideration to their audience? When was the consumer enthroned as the judge and the jury and the executioner of all that can be ever created? But more importantly, why? In no stage in human history has doubt ever been doubted. But we are its worshippers. We have enthroned it. And in doing so, in doubt we believe. In triumphing, we have been defeated.

(Uditi Sen)


For what a philosopher, who has only a casual acquaintance with historical practice, may glance at and dismiss, with a ferocious scowl, as ‘empiricism’, may in fact be the result of arduous confrontations, pursued both in conceptual engagements (the definition of appropriate questions, the elaboration of hypotheses, and the exposure of ideological attributions in pre-existing historiography) and also in the interstices of historical method itself.

(E.P. Thompson)