The Age of Theory

… the best means of career advancement is to attach yourselves to initiatives which are
purely ideological, and so cannot fail in practice, because there is no practice. —Aurelien

I keep returning in my mind to Thomas Chatterton Williams’ term The Age of Theory as a one-size-fits-all explanation how the postmodern era has gone positively batty. That’s clearly reductio ad adsurdam, but let me make the argument anyway. What follows owes more to my own survey of the scene than anything by Williams, but he got the ball rolling.

In modern politico-speak (and elsewhere), it’s not unusual to hear phrases such as seeking justice, protecting freedom, saving democracy, and the like. Everyone knows what is meant, sorta, but if pressed to define in any rigorous way, failures abound. Such is the character of any concept or body of ideas cited frequently but lacking in specificity: it becomes reified. Cynic that I am, my immediate reaction upon hearing a reified concept invoked is to withdraw consideration and support. That’s because it’s a loose, emotional appeal that typically can’t stand up to scrutiny. And although a commonplace in speech making, news reporting, and political argument, garbage phrases such as these mark the speaker or writer as someone not to be sought out or consulted for thoughtful analysis principally because there are no meaningful starting lines or endpoints. Even if one uses the current state of affairs as the takeoff, even for the purpose of preserving the status quo (the true meaning of conservation), there can never be a point of successful arrival because no conventional measure allows one to know that the goal has been achieved. The goad to, say, “save democracy” by voting for a certain candidate can’t be demonstrated reliably even if/when the candidate wins. I reject the supposition that the candidate winning is itself the measure; that’s just racehorse politics. The real work of governance begins after taking office. The lack of concrete evidence of achieving a purported goal is also what’s meant by the initial quote above by Aurelien, a writer on Substack I read on occasion.

But wait, it gets worse (it always gets worse). If reification is to concretize otherwise amorphous concepts that lack specificity and measurability, the process also works paradoxically in reverse to render concrete practice more purely ideological. The term ideation is sometimes used pejoratively to describe measurable, achievable goals that have been turned into open-ended and/or disembodied concepts. For example, capitalism is a complex socioeconomic system that nonetheless has knowable, measurable attributes and outcomes. But as economists theorize about the practice of capitalism and measurable attributes (e.g., the inflation rate and the Gini coefficient), typically under political pressure, outcomes are regularly shifted, revised, and distorted by various bureaucratic offices until useful meaning is lost in a maze of obfuscation and outright lying. Even more egregiously, now that the U.S. dollar is no longer pegged to gold (“real money” by those hawking precious metals), fiat currency and modern monetary theory (MMT) have turned money (and its inverse: debt) into mere social consensus, quite literally transforming cold, hard cash into pixelated notions on ledgers somewhere. Cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) are further examples of entirely theoretical stores of wealth that in truth mask the destruction of wealth.

For me, this is the essence of The Age of Theory: the disintegration and dematerialization of real things in favor of their symbolic tokens. Other instances of this effect include individual flight from reality into social media, augmented reality, and virtual reality (lots of overlap in those). Rather than live one’s life in actuality (meat world to some), many prefer to watch others’ fantasy lives confabulated on social media, project their own fantasies avatars into digital spaces, and/or seek the unalloyed goal of Transhumanism by escaping the body entirely and uploading one’s consciousness into a computer. Thus far, only modest steps on that slippery slope are possible, but the offer not just of augment but to dematerialize oneself and embrace digital oblivion is out there and often hotly desired. As observed psychologists and psychometricians, deranging and destabilizing effects are already evident across the culture. Chief among them is renewed interest and even willingness to let the nuclear genie back out of the bottle with strategic strikes as though escalation would not ensue quickly and put a resounding end to civilization in a series of blinding flashes. That’s the ultimate disintegration and dematerialization made possible by theorizing undertaken by those dangerously estranged from reality.