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75 Chapter 4 When Theory Becomes a Material Force Gramsci’s Conjunctural Natures What is philosophy? In what sense can a conception of the world be called a philosophy? How has philosophy been conceived hitherto? Does the philosophy of praxis renew this conception? What is meant by a “speculative” philosophy? Would the philosophy of praxis ever be able to have a speculative form? What are the relationships between ideologies, conceptions of the world and philosophies? What is or should be the relationship between theory and practice? How do traditional philosophies conceive of this relationship? etc. The answer to these and other questions constitutes the “theory” of the philosophy of praxis. —Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks And so I think you should stay here with your sword drawn if you’re set on it and your anger is big enough. You have good cause I admit. But if your anger is a short one, you’d better go. —Mother Courage, in Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children TO CONSIDER THE IMMANENT CRITIQUE discussed in chapter 3 as abstract from the historically and geographically situated practices that permit it—as some vain metaphysical fancy—would be to render it utterly powerless . Instead, we need a clearer understanding of the mutually constitutive ways in which theory and practice shape each other in definite historical and geographical contexts. Returning to South Africa, the small protest that arose in Amaoti in February 2003 built on a history of intense struggle that is etched into the built environment of the settlement. In turn, the laboring acts of provisioning ahouseholdwithwater in Amaotihavebeen deeply influenced and shapedby such struggles. Laboringbodies and militant subjectivitieshave been shaped in relation to the racialized categories of apartheid, a gendered division of labor, and the postapartheid economic order. Understanding the development of these practices and the mutually constitutive relationship they have with militant possibilities calls for a return to the “philosophy of praxis.” No theorist is as closely associatedwith this peculiar phrase as Antonio Gramsci . The core of his Prison Notebooks was an attempt to take forward marxism as a historically and geographically situated immanent critique.1 Thus, it is one of the signal contributions of Antonio Gramsci’s writing to focus our attention on this earthliness of thought and its vital role in permitting and constraining the transformation of theory into a material, world-changing force. In this chapter, I will seek to follow Gramsci’s lead and focus on the historically and geographically specific terrain over which militant knowledges and world-changing practices have coevolved in one South African informal settlement. In doing this, I want to dwell for a little longer on what happens to sparks of radical insight when they appear in the world. To take Holloway’s metaphor of the hidden volcano that resides within each of us,2 I wish to question the ways in which the anger he describes can be transformed into the kind of slow-burning rage that Mother Courage demands of us (before she goes on to capitulate herself). It was of course to such questions that Gramsci devoted significant parts of the Prison Notebooks. The great weight he afforded subaltern perspectives was balanced with a recognition that these frequently appear as scattered and disorganized fragments.The notebooks were, at least in part, an effort to understand how these sometimes contradictory insights might be organized and the role to be played by a reinvigorated philosophy of praxis in transforming theory into a material force. In large part because of this new theorization of the relationship between theory and practice, Gramsci is quite rightly recognized as one of the richest theorists of subaltern practices and thought. His provocative claim that all are intellectuals is an explicit recognition of the potential for critical insights to emerge within quotidian life.3 Gramsci goes on to argue that it is “essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers.”4 This is richly suggestive for our attempts to develop a radically democratic politics from the day-to-day making of natures. Critical insights, moreover, are to be found in the practical experience of changing the world. A future society is to be born from the historical knowledge of past efforts at making reality. If we take Smith’s claims from chapter 1 seriously,5...

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