in 'the soles of black folk: these reeboks were made for runnin’ (from the white man)' john jackson jr. writes

[t]heories often serve to displace and subsume the subjects about which they comment and contend. the wonderfully complicated world in which we live is relegated to the calm, cool and calculated lines of sociological manuscripts that tie up loose ends of analysis such that “theory” ignores the ways in which lived lives exist beyond the hypothesis, outstretch it, outlive it…surely, to theorize is often a homicidal act, a killing of the heterogeneity of the world, a knife thrust into the very heart of life (jackson 1997, 178)

this is my fear with research...that in some way i have completely missed the point, relegated the people to the margins&footnotes, have committed a discursive violence to the world i hoped to better understand by forcing feral subjects into domesticated 'disciplines' and schools of thought. i wrote my advisors a research update. i quoted siegfried kracauer who said that 'one can distinguish between
two images of the city: those that are consciously framed, and others that reveal themselves unintentionally." i also took a throw-back fom johnathan raban's 1974 book soft city where he wrote 'the city as we image it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics...' theorizing about johannesburg--the city is like trying to tie up and tame a wild animal. its the same disciplinary task the city itself is trying to complete. its a disciplinary task that i am not excited about.