Theory as doctrinal surprise
Twenty summers and 20 thousand years ago, a group of internet marketers published a joint document called The Cluetrain Manifesto. Its chief contention was that “markets are conversations.” Not long after, officers at an elite Israeli military unit gave an interview to architectural scholar Eyal Weizman in which they claimed that “space is only an interpretation.” Anyone can make statements that sound unreal or provocative for attention’s sake, but quotes like these can be pregnant enough with meaning that they ring both trivially true and bogus if taken too literally. Surely enough, markets can only work if there is communication (even if only between stock trading bots); likewise, an experienced eye can look at an empty room and see its manifold potential: maybe a kitchenette, perhaps a baby room. But these are – emphatically – not truisms. By reflecting a glimmer of truth, they invite you to entertain lines of thinking that wouldn’t have arrived to you through the pragmatic everyday management of your concrete affairs. This is theory.
Theory is not philosophy – however influential philosophical thinking might be in its style. Since the very dawn of philosophy, its practitioners have been mocked as having their heads in the clouds, pondering the ultimate nature of ultimate natures. The military theorists interviewed by Weizman have little understanding of this “love for wisdom itself.” Indeed, even while studying and drawing from Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, they are not concerned with the justness of war or the ethical boundaries to military action. Instead, they literally engage in deconstruction: by successfully analyzing how the enemy organizes and reads its spaces (logic, after all, descends from the Greek lego, “I arrange”), they’re able to invade it disruptively. Streets (rife with human obstacles) are reinterpreted as walls, and walls (which can be penetrated with cameras that see beyond them -- and subsequently broken through) become windows. The mission ends before anyone else has even understood what’s going on.
A more recent example where theory effects “doctrinal surprise” (as defined by Shimon Naveh, perhaps the foremost Israeli proponent of Deleuze and Tschumi) is K-HOLE’s report on “normcore.” K-HOLE undersells (or understates its power) as a fashion trend forecasting company. The report itself is full of little provocations to be amplified by trade magazines and retailers. But the concept of normcore (later oversimplified by Vogue to be an infatuation with blank, nonsignified clothing– except perhaps for brand names) is actually developed from a reflection on the idea of generations as identity buckets and the young as a premium market. K-HOLE disabuses us of all such talk and instead develops the notion of “Youth Mode” – not a way of consuming or even feeling but a mode of engaging with the world.
By this point, K-HOLE is far past its narrow commercial mission. Instead, the contemporary dispersion of mainstream culture is analyzed through the particular existential lens of Youth Mode. Contrary to many media analysts’ unimaginative talk of a “long tail” (which tries to salvage mass culture by imagining it surrounded by new satellites), culture is said to percolate through “mass indie” — tactics that search for authenticity in differentiation. But mass indie has specific failure points, which make it unsustainable. Burnout from mass indie leads people to what they term “Acting Basic” – which is what you might have seen in Vogue at some point. These dynamics – or rather, the inherent insufficiency of the solutions they lead to – eventually point to normcore (and I’d rather let you read K-HOLE’s own explanation of it). Those who have jumped to Acting Basic as a fashion trend may or may not be stuck with excess inventory. The concept of normcore? That’s a fashion trend factory – as well as (implicitly; this isn’t worked out by them and has to be developed) an entirely different conception of the mass clothing market – yes, a conversation, but one intended for “strategic misinterpretation.”
Having read a text that cites Doc Searls, the Israeli army, and an in-depth study of new fashion marketing ideas, you might more open-minded towards arguments that invokes French mavericks such as Jacques Lacan. If you have read any Lacanian literature (maybe excepting Lacan’s own seminars), you may remember something insular, self-obsessed, and – a major sin in our current culture of objectivity – unfalsifiable. Yes, psychoanalysis (particularly as practiced by Lacan’s disciples) does not appear to be a tenable therapeutic practice. And yet, why does Lacan continue to inspire philosophers and political extremists? Because there’s something in that ball of yarn that promises fresh reinterpretations and misinterpretations (le non-dupes errant, as the slogan goes) of our most complex and ill-defined problems – internet marketing, unconventional warfare, fashion forecasting.
Lacan invites us to stare at a pair of train tracks and think of them as the master businessman, the hysteric, the university professor, the psychoanalyst: maybe they’re parallel, maybe they’re crooked; maybe they converge at infinity, or maybe the subject itself is inured to looking at the world through projective geometry. Perhaps the Israelis were able to see the train tracks from the perspective of a fast-coming, unexpected freight train. Maybe fashion is the projective plane.
Now, I’m not -- at all -- a Lacanian. While I continue to expand my toolkit, my major intellectual influences have come from elsewhere (going through them would be a significant detour here). What’s more, my formative experiences have all been in environments like government and corporate consulting, where I’m typically presented as an economist (an understatement) and mathematician (a slight exaggeration). The stuff I ultimately sell is oriented towards objectivity and, most of the time, advanced quantitative methods. But then, the stuff that Shimon Naveh sells is war and death.
In the consulting setting, a spade is rarely just a spade; the actual problem to be solved is quite often hidden in the spaces between words; sometimes solving the problem is not even the goal. Resolving the ambiguity and indeterminacy of consulting jobs requires specific skills that my more experienced coworkers continuously hone. Those skills are craftmanship bordering on artistry. But, I keep finding out, there’s also the opportunity for theory, even if it must be smuggled as practical advice.
Now, theory invites me to mis/reinterpret this too. There is a point of view from which wearing my theoretician's hat with my business shirts is suicidal. This is Lacan’s “master discourse”: of course the train tracks are parallel; theory is not practiced. But maybe I should make a practice out of theory. theory zero is an exploration of what this can mean in reality for you.