{"id":685856,"date":"2022-06-05T08:43:13","date_gmt":"2022-06-05T08:43:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=245106"},"modified":"2022-06-05T08:43:13","modified_gmt":"2022-06-05T08:43:13","slug":"common-sense-in-the-form-of-theory-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/06\/05\/common-sense-in-the-form-of-theory-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Common Sense in the Form of Theory"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image by Max B\u00f6hme<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In the ideological disciplines\u2014the humanities and social sciences\u2014it is rare to come across a theoretical work that doesn\u2019t seem to fetishize verbiage and jargonizing for their own sake. From the relatively lucid analytical Marxism of an Erik Olin Wright[1] to the turgid cultural theory of a Stuart Hall, pretentious prolixity is, apparently, seen as an end in itself. In such an academic context, one of the highest services an intellectual can perform is simply to return to the basics of theoretic common sense, stated clearly and concisely. Society is very complex, but, as Noam Chomsky likes to say, insofar as we understand it at all, our understanding can in principle be expressed rather simply and straightforwardly. Not only is such expression more democratic and accessible, thus permitting a broader diffusion of critical understanding of the world; it also has the merit of showing that, once you shed the paraphernalia of most academic writing, nothing particularly profound is being said. Vivek Chibber\u2019s The Class Matrix constitutes an exemplary demonstration of this fact, and of these virtues.<\/p>\n

Chibber has been waging a war against postmodern theory for some time now, ably defending Marxian common sense against generations of carping \u201cculturalist\u201d critics. His Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) brilliantly showed that the Marxian \u201cmetanarrative\u201d that has come under sustained attack by poststructuralists and postmodernists retains its value as an explanation of the modern world, and that many of the (often highly obscure) alternative conceptualizations of postcolonial theorists are deeply flawed. More recently, in an article published in 2020 in the journal Catalyst (\u201cOrientalism and Its Afterlives\u201d), Chibber has persuasively criticized Edward Said\u2019s classic Orientalism for its idealistic interpretation of modern imperialism as emanating in large part from an age-old European Orientalist discourse, rather than from a capitalist political economy that\u2014as materialists argue\u2014merely used such a discourse to rationalize its global expansion. In more popular venues too, notably Jacobin, Chibber has argued for the centrality of materialism to the projects of both interpreting and changing the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The post Common Sense in the Form of Theory<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Image by Max B\u00f6hme.<\/p>\n

In the ideological disciplines\u2014the humanities and social sciences\u2014it is rare to come across a theoretical work that doesn\u2019t seem to fetishize verbiage and jargonizing for their own sake. From the relatively lucid analytical Marxis…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3831,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228,229,230],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685856"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3831"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685856"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":685857,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685856\/revisions\/685857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}