Lae last night I coined a very satisfying phrase to describe a discourse condition: theory-shaped debris
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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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