This reciprocal blindness of practice in relation to theory and theory in relation to practice produces, on the one hand, an under-theorisation of practice and, on the other, an irrelevance of theory. That is to say that the blindness of theory renders practice invisible, while the blindness of practice makes theory irrelevant. This reciprocal lack of co-ordination gives rise to, on the side of practice, an extreme oscillation between revolutionary spontaneity and a self-censored and ultimately innocuous sense of the possible, and on the side of theory, an equally extreme alternation between a post-facto reconstructive zeal and an arrogant indifference to anything unaccounted for by theory.I suspect that I'd get more sustenance from Michael Casey's Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image (Vintage, 2009), praised by one reviewer as
an intellectual history of the Che brand, approaching his subject with an historian's sense of detail, a historiographer's sense of a cultural import, and a journalist’s mix of skepticism, awe and mirth. By turns entertaining, thoughtful and scathing, Casey's work is a satisfying excavation into politics, pop culture and that iconic photo of CheIt sounds much more accessible than Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies (Pluto Press ,2004) by John Hutnyk, a critique of Jacques Derrida, James Clifford, Gayatri Spivak, Georges Bataille, Homi Bhabha, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri in explaining "why the 'Marxism' of the academy is unrecognisable and largely unrecognised in anti-capitalist struggles". Oh dear, nothing like doctrinal purity and academic point scoring in a style reminiscent of de Sousa Santos.
In contrast there's plenty of fizz in Alan Macfarlane's The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property & Social Transition (Blackwell, 1978), to which I've returned after thirty years, and Ernest Gellner's Thought & Change (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964)
