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I once used the phrase “intellectual rubble” to describe what David Graeber’s ideas felt like to me. That’s a theory that never came together. Theory shaped debris is the other end, bits and pieces of a once-whole crashed theory that litter the landscape.
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It can still have value, like how the Vulture constructs weapons out of alien tech rubble in spider-man homecoming
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I’ve had a decades long fascination with a physical equivalent, the oddly shaped bits of packaging support pieces made of plastic or styrofoam that come in gadget boxes. They did=uggest larger structures and careful engineering but are mostly useless after unboxing
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It feels wrong to throw that stuff away. It is basically trash but doesn’t look like it. The ghost of the gadget infuses the, with apparent low-entropy meaning. Theory-shaped rubble is like that.
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Take ideas that come from larger grand-unified theories but are often deployed in stand-alone isolation, like “raise the minimum wage” or “lower interest rates” … that’s theory-shaped debris. Bits and pieces of collapsed theories nobody really defends in complete form anymore.
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If you do some archaeological investigation in the debris and trace it backwards you’ll find a few obscure ideologues somewhere who still know the whole intellectual edifice the pieces came from, but they sound psychotic now
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There’s a sense of dead giants in the past who once built the now-collapsed things. Now there’s just little Wall-e type theory robots running around larping carrying on the tradition. It’s like a Straussian collapse. The Big Men are dead. The things they built didn’t endure.
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Replying to
Mr. Codrescu would like a word
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Once upon a time I did an email interview with Andrei Codrescu, now lost to bitrot, who told me "...We move in the House of Ecriture among the debris of theory, but that's not where the party is." and it haunts me from time to time. Theory is not the map is not the territory
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