Re: Further Notes on Theory/Practice (Was Questioning the desire...)

[cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Carrol Cox)]

JornJorn, I think this is an important thread which I hope others join. Here
I wish to add a note to the bread-kneading example as you amplify it.

    Your mother *showed* and explained it. I could tell you how to make
my kind of corn bread over the net. In other words, the process I follow
is *completely* reduced to theory, and can be expressed in words (a
manual or a cookbook). Hence when I make cornbread my practice is controlled
by theory, a theory that in fact emerged from someone else's practice years
or decades ago (I took the recipe off a box of Quaker corn meal (they later
changed it, then changed it back). But at some point in the past someone
had to mess around, trying various combinations of cornmeal, wheat flour,
and sugar to arrive at the recipe (theory). Kneading has not yet been
raised to that level of theory, so it has to be either *demonstrated* or
practiced in a clumsy way.

    As I understand it, the difference between handmade and wheelmade
pottery was something like the difference between kneading bread and
following (exactly) a recipe to make cornbread. In handmade pottery
the fingers knew what the head and tongue could not express; in wheel
made pottery a sort of technical lore (theory) became possible, and
the world's first mass production existed. That is, Person A could
give instructions to Persons a, b, c (perhaps slaves) and they could
then turn out any number of pots that were more or less exact duplicates
of each other, while in the earlier stages of handmade pottery, every
pot would turn  out different; it was a skill the woman had in her
fingers and senses, and she could only teach it as your mother taught
you to knead bread. Demonstrate, watch, demonstrate some more.

    The relationship of theory and practice is at the heart of Marxism,
and we are not going to solve it on a maill*st, but I think it's important
to pursue it some anyway.
    Carrol



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