#theorycel

[258punkweight]

Is this the worst timeline? Are you a wolfaboo? An unbased turbovirgin twidiot westoid, perhaps? Maybe even an SJW triggered tumblrina vro fluent in Yapanese? Are you a dank topkek tradlarp theorycel? Perchance you slid into the dms of the soyjak aislop orange man bad refucklican? Did they hit the pentagon? Did the thicc thirsttrap they/them spoopy schizoposter romaboo ghost you on read? Was the rentoid roseboy your Roman Empire, sister in christ? You thought you were the react Andy to the unspoken skibidi rizz greypilled Mr. Beast clone? Was the Groyper Truecel Troll going your 13th reason why? You had enough ropefuel from your zoosexual PDF File unaliver f3t1sh1st vro getting called out and doxxed by the Sharty?

new copypasta just dropped

[eldenrat]

my brain has decided it is massive oc overhaul time because there somehow weren’t enough in-universe theorycels yapping about how much better things could be when their ideal society rises from the ashes of the Shattering.

[barryogg]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, but the whatever-you-call-it cluster of the internet right (e.g. the group centered around BAP, Zero HPL, Passage Publishing etc.) has zero value preposition for basically anyone. Completely collapsed into their own assess, to the level that would put most fervent DSA theorycels to shame. Reduced to inane mean-girls-act catfighting on twitter all day every day.

[solarsands]

Is this the worst timeline? Are you a wolfaboo? An unbased turbovirgin twidiot westoid, perhaps? Maybe even an SJW triggered tumblrina vro fluent in Yapanese? Are you a dank topkek tradlarp theorycel? Perchance you slid into the dms of the soyjak aislop orange man bad refucklican? Did they hit the pentagon? Did the thicc thirsttrap they/them spoopy schizoposter romaboo ghost you on read? Was the rentoid roseboy your Roman Empire, sister in christ? You thought you were the react Andy to the unspoken skibidi rizz greypilled Mr. Beast clone? Was the Groyper Truecel Troll going your 13th reason why? You had enough ropefuel from your trooner zoosexual PDF File unaliver f3t1sh1st vro getting called out and doxxed by the Sharty?

stop trying to mind hack me

[grandhotelabyss]

As someone who appears to have undergone their intellectual formation during the capital 'T' Theory era, closely associated with a chic and predominantly discursive radicalism (the left of the left of the left), how did you begin to grow increasingly skeptical of this milieu and its orthodoxies? In my experience, most of those we now label as "theorycels" feel that abandoning this tradition would equate to a wasted life, especially given the extensive reading involved.

Thanks! It's a big question. In some ways I'm less skeptical of theory now than I've ever been (I assume you mean poststructuralist theory). I entered college with The Western Canon and Sexual Personae under my arm, so I began my tertiary education by being very wary of it. I've always had a dispositional dislike of theory as a literary style: the dogmatic tone coupled with the extreme abstraction, so that the law is being laid down, except that you don't quite know what it says. Even Foucault complained of Derrida's style that it represented "the terrorism of obscurantism." I hated the smug way theory was used in English departments to discredit literature as a machinic combination of preexisting ideologemes, to banish the sense of ineffable inspiration and world-transforming mission so many major writers themselves have always testified to—to discredit literature as one discourse among others, rather than the queen of the discourses, which it is (and if you can't say it is in an English department, where the hell can you say it?).

By the time I entered graduate school, though, theory was on the way out in English departments, to be replaced by various forms of historicism and other kinds of sociological and reductive "cultural materialist" approaches and the digital humanities. These approaches are far more anti-literary than theory ever was—especially if you actually read theory's primary sources, figures like Barthes and Deleuze, and find out how much more romantic and psychedelic they actually are in contrast to their literal-minded, puritanical Anglo translators and redactors. At least theory understands, as historicism does not, that the inner plurality and polysemy of every major text guarantees that the text by definition exceeds, defies, transforms its context, including its past and its future.

Theory has always had a hostility to the state that infuriated Marxists—I take theory to be a late Cold War manifestation of anti-communism—and therefore it made a brave showing against the totalitarian technocracy of the pandemic era, so much so that at least one would-be technocrat wrote a whole book to denounce it (see the link to my review of The Revenge of the Real below). It can also furnish resources to scrutinize the claims of the identitarian left (cf. "Postmodernism Is Good, Actually"). (That it also helps us to criticize the biologism and Social Darwinism now so fashionable on and adjacent to the right today should go without saying.) Its bracing anti-humanism is refreshing in the face of the "therapeutic society." Michel Foucault would not advise us to "trust science" and might be skeptical that we can "have" a gender, and Jacques Lacan thinks our vaunted "trauma" stems from our induction into the order of language and that therefore there is no real treatment except to play with language.

It's still not my preferred reading material, though—too dry, too abstract (though no more or less than Hegel, Kant, Spinoza; a lot of people who don't like "theory" just don't like "philosophy," and I have my days, too). Paglia's critique of theory was entertainingly external, a stand-up comic's brutal mockery. But Bloom was friends with Derrida and de Man, so I take his criticism more seriously: that theory deadeningly codified the insights it plundered from imaginative literature, which it then turn around (resentfully) and attacked. Derrida was "French Joyce," said Bloom, and Foucault "French Shakespeare." I tried to make this very point in my doctoral dissertation:

The wager of this study is that such novel-theory has, in my view, mistaken its own genealogy. I particularly want to engage the skeptical tradition of novel-theory because I hope to substantiate the claim that its own posture of suspicion toward subjectivity is first articulated in and by the novel of Aestheticism, which will become the modernist novel proper. How, after all, can critics so astutely observe the operations of ideology if they do not claim some distance from its demands, just as Pater and Wilde did when they declared art autonomous from social claims? My argument about the Aestheticist novel as thinking form can be summarized as follows: by declaring its distance from apparatuses of state, church, and market, the novel under Aestheticism claims for itself a privileged vantage from which to produce critical knowledge about these institutions using its own procedures rather than relying tautologically on those of the hegemonic forces it contests. Furthermore, in developing those procedures, it reflects critically upon them too, becoming a recursive form of criticism that examines its own entanglement in the relations it criticizes. Because of this reflexivity, autonomous literature may be complicit with ideology but can never be fully identical to it. In short, the modern novel looks more like the kinds of bold, agential theory written by critics such as [D. A.] Miller and [Nancy] Armstrong than one would guess from reading their works.

Paglia's right, though, that it has no sense of nature and little sense of spirituality and is finally too impoverished a vision. I agree with D. H. Lawrence that the proper place for philosophy is probably the novel. We could talk about exceptions to all my criticisms—Foucault is lucid, Deleuze is wild, Barthes is novelistic—and overall I find the achievement of those thinkers, insofar as I understand it, to be mixed.

Some of my further thoughts on theory can be found in my essay on Foucault and my essay on Lyotard, while my attack on the tendencies that succeeded theory in literary studies and on the American left at large can be found in my essay on Franco Moretti and my essay on Benjamin Bratton. And you probably won't want to miss the chapter in my novel Portraits and Ashes where a company of academic critics spend pages debating the significance of an art installation before it turns out that the installation's purpose is to slaughter its audience—my horror-comedy version, perhaps, of art's superiority to theory.

[knowyouronion]

Is this the worst timeline? Are you a wolfaboo? An unbased turbovirgin twidiot westoid, perhaps? Maybe even an SJW triggered tumblrina vro fluent in Yapanese? Are you a dank topkek tradlarp theorycel? Perchance you slid into the dms of the soyjak aislop orange man bad refucklican? Did they hit the pentagon? Did the thicc thirsttrap they/them spoopy schizoposter romaboo ghost you on read? Was the rentoid roseboy your Roman Empire, sister in christ? You thought you were the react Andy to the unspoken skibidi rizz greypilled Mr. Beast clone? Was the Groyper Truecel Troll going to be your 13th reason why? You had enough ropefuel from your zoosexual PDF File unaliver f3t1sh1st vro getting called out and doxxed by the Sharty? (this is just a test of my markovian chain. liek yakub)

yeah probably

[neruomancer]

Anti theorycel aktion

[babybsweettea]

You made a statement that it “absolutely shits on Labor Theory of Value” when it doesn’t. The joke doesn’t make sense if you understand the concepts it’s trying to speak on.

[heavenlyhorses]

on rare occasions I am forced to see discourse on my dash that makes me want to log off. theorycels get the rope and they better learn to skip lest I beat them with it

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

Wow I never expected you to get a bunch of angry asks from Bronze Age Pervert. Very excited for this new season of DWSHH. Also, thoughts on LCX? the new platform opens for it tomorrow and I’m getting lots of conflicting info from Biz lmao

lcX? dont rly care beyond binance and uniswap

like literally dont care, this sort of news besides the normie wave is irrelevant

Wow I never expected you to get a bunch of angry asks from Bronze Age Pervert. 

yeah i have his doxx lmao

i dunno what happened but i think its related to how BAP is a yale academia track political researcher who did his thesis on instrumentalizing the right with “trumpian” (see: dropping the IQ grade of conversation to levels that wont hurt the feelings of the lazy) unga bunga speak. KB has forged a focus on rooting out the disparate thinktanks and figures who have spent a century and some decades shaping the west into a byzantine paypig onlyfans for NYC/London financiers (in the literal sense of the word; the banks, the morgan stanleys, the citigroups etc etc). Ergo, what BAP does is something he correctly see as not differing so much from the manipulative evil of figures like walter lippman, leo strauss, etcc etc.. Figures who devise means to control others rather than free them.

it really seems there was a Dark Enlightenment/theorycel right twitter schism between the liberals (libertarians) and authoritarians on extremely uneven lines of ideology and community. One side is informed by intuition and negation of the other, the mobilization of some sort of overton window shift.. and the other by intensive study and Rosicrucian enlightenment. basically, which of the groypers started/kept reading and which dream of a settling for degenerate simulacrum of tradition based on the phantasm of mid 20th century corporate advertising, which is the american house special of nationalism without nation.

tho idk if KB is actually an authoritarian so much as a man wishing to produce some uhh... in plain plain terms, some sort of platonic like scholar/philosopher/poet/artist caste. Like create and make shit, like shape the world with their passion and autism. He feels utter contempt for people who spend their energy trying to rip off others, larp, and demand conformity of him and others... which is exactly what those trying to tear him down are doing. Are these people actually creating their own shit and impressing their will on the world? Or are they selling you another liberal lifestyle choice and demanding the world conform to their comfort level?

Furthermore, logo, KB et al take positions opposite of the glowing JQ and eugenics shit and that enrages the squatting ideologues who spent the past several years deferring any personal scholarly effort to the former to educate them. What the BAP (idk about what bap actually thinks beyond his little social media influencer project) and supplemantary “hurr books bad, workout good” false dichotomy dipshits dont quite realize is that their position is itself every bit as manufactured the way “PMC” socjus DSA liberal-socialists are farmed to reinforce the democrat status quo. In the end you are funneled into buttressing aforementioned new york/london financiers via their party props.

idk

literally read books and make shit, damn dude. why are people so hurt by this. Very literally, they just feel betrayed because they were building up this community or space to do and talk about shit they could do and talk about no where else and suddenly their audience goes “no you cant say that”

like to frame it around political or ideological loyalty is your problem. Their idea or goal was something greater than facile elections, partisanship and trump.

[casualdadcore]

I like and have read a lot of Orwell but every romance subplot in his books gives off big simp/theorycel energy

[parasiticflesh]

fake leftists will be like “I don’t read or know shit I just hate cops and that somehow makes me better than you academic theorycel marxists”

[lokwinske]

I have an aggressive lust and hatred for theorycel males especially hardcore Marx/Hegelian moids. I absolutely hate them because I think they could beat me in an argument. I'm the one who should be right. But men who piss me off also give me a violent sense of attraction to them

[aufklaeranlage]

on another (but related) note: I finally found a reading circle for anti ödipus and that outsode pressure really helps me to actually read it. Meeting the whole german TheoryCel Circle on Twitter was on of the best and probably worst things for my mental health.

[grandhotelabyss]

As its critics from the 1980s to the present have emphasized, “theory” attempts a fundamental break with the liberalism, in the broad sense, that first became ascendant in Western societies beginning in the 18th century. This break took a variety of forms, but the major thinkers placed under the “theory” heading shared a broad concern with the crisis that had come to afflict the epistemological frameworks and political assumptions inherited from the Enlightenment and embodied in science, technology, and the modern state and its institutions. This preoccupation is present in Heidegger, with his account of technological “enframing”; Horkheimer and Adorno, with their pronouncement that “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant”; Foucault, with his systematic critique of the institutional structures by which modern power operates; and Girard, with his apocalyptic vision of a world that risks reverting to archaic violence.

Geoff Shullenberger, “Theorycels in Trumpworld”

(Much of my official education was conducted by Marxists and much of my unofficial education by writers at least adjacent to neoconservatism. These left- and right-Hegelians agreed—it was one of the few things they did agree on—that Theory and its adjuncts were closer to fascism than to any kind of liberal or left tradition. 

Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind complains of “The Nietzscheanization of the Left,” on the grounds that when Nietzsche dissolves truth in the will-to-power he clears a path for Hitler; by contrast, Bloom allows that Marx at least remains within the truth-seeking Socratic tradition. Strange a bedfellow as he makes with Bloom, Edward Said is not far from this concern when he contends that Theory, given its clerical textuality and incognizance of its material social matrix, does not meet the criteria of what he calls “secular criticism.” 

On a level above intercollegiate political polemics, though, Bloom and Said both understand that Nietzsche & Co. are not dispatched so easily—that both liberal and left societies, and the management-by-bloodless-and-soulless-expert to which their secularism gives rise, is vulnerable to challenge by both ideas and institutions more alive than is reason to the heights and depths of human experience. 

Since we're reading people's old doctoral dissertations, as Shullenberger does with a MAGA media man's thesis on Heidegger, let me here note that, to spare liberal and left societies the pains described in the above paragraph, I took the trouble to in my own to restate an old argument in new terms and at some length: to wit, enlightened society produces its own vaccination against irrationalist terrors in the form of art, which arrays into complex and recursive forms of irreducible order the chaos that enlightened society necessarily banishes from its grid. 

Art relieves us of the grid's oppressive linearity, correctly denounced by Nietzsche, Foucault, Adorno, et al., while keeping the grid extant so that we can enjoy the genuine benefits of the predictability it offers; and at its best, art may provide hints for improving the grid, even teaching the gridmakers that a curve or spiral will not interfere as much as they may fear with the orderly operation of enlightened institutions. But this inoculation only works if you let art actually be art, that is, if you let it stand a little aside from social reason rather than reducing it to a political polemic by other means, as Bloom does when he objects to Death in Venice for sexually traducing high culture or Said does when he chides Jane Austen for being complicit with slavery. 

No one should ever read anyone's doctoral dissertation, old or new, but immediately after writing mine I also wrote a novel. In Portraits and Ashes, a literal theorycel—I wrote the book before this word existed—speaks the liberationist language of High Theory even as he founds a severely irrationalist cult to challenge a normative dominant liberal civilization that cannot in itself satisfy anyone's deepest or highest needs. My novel's heroes must both resist the authentic temptation of this cult and find a way to live within liberal society that answers the indestructible claims of the id and the soul. Luckily for them, one is a reader and the other two are painters—though these are just metaphors for what anyone is when tacking between reason's over- and undersides while still navigating our chartered world. 

Even though one persuasive complaint about this world is that it compels everyone to commerce all the time, I still have to tell you this in conclusion: you can read a chapter of Portraits and Ashes here and buy the whole book here.)

[elicoor13]

How tf am I supposed to doomscroll if past-me was a genius about how to curate their social media feeds?

Like, idk how I fucked up Twitter so hard, but I am so glad to be free of it. I was caught up in a really weird crowd. Finding myself in theorycel Twitter because I wanted reading recommendations beyond the boring stuff I know I *should* read. But also like...damn that environment is hella negative. Moreso than I initially thought.

I got an interesting read on the people around me though, and I think those experiences will help me to learn more in general. But I wouldn't be mutuals with most of them again. 2angsty4me. And also super edgy.