Low Theory as a Space

We need utopian thinking because the state of the world is intolerable.¹ Thinking differently requires an opening, but we have been “forced to resist… while not being able to develop methods of struggle which are affirmative, aggregative, and constitutive of permanent organization of autonomous, free, and democratic life.”² All the concentric circles are getting smaller and smaller,³ yet “logistics [cannot] contain what it has relegated to the hold.”⁴ We have always continued to dream into the beyond, regardless of whether to do so “announces a political project.”⁵ “For every orthodoxy there is an equal and opposite blasphemy,”⁶ so let us seek out and welcome these imminent possibilities.

What we need today is utopia, “not a plan but a method of thinking of both present and possible futures.”⁷ Of course, it may not look as expected: indeed, what “we have is the sideways time of the now, a latent destiny.”⁸ It was in McKenzie Wark's words that I first encountered “low theory.” She was referring to something I knew and had felt: the imperfect impulse for assembly—radical and spontaneous, world-building and mundane, ephemeral and deeply affecting. The way we make things more than before.

Low theory is at once slang and a master term, the elusive verb of utopia and the dogged noun of agency. Low theory is the autonomous space we have, as well as the ways we make these spaces and hold them close, keep them sustained in spite of and despite the conditions. The “theory”? Because it concerns itself with the normative “ought” of what might be, a visioning of another world. It is “low” because it is ordinary, a testament to the everyday suspension of judgement which accompanies the fundamental drive of becoming, a kind of survival, the administration of community as well as a refusal to bow to the established rules of engagement. As shorthand, it aims to capture regenerative and emergent social practices that may dissipate as fast as they bloom. Low theory is all of those embodied, plural, multifaceted, and necessarily surprising processes of sense-making that reveal and build our everyday world.

Low theory, for Jack Halberstam, “tries to locate all the in-between spaces that save us from being snared by the hooks of hegemony and speared by the seductions of the gift shop,” offering instead a “way out of the usual traps and impasses of binary formulations.”⁹ And we do use the word “space,” as in the space between, but it is a misnomer. This is the kind of space that “resists analysis because of its novelty and because of the real and formal complexity it connotes,”¹⁰ a kind of space only “revealed in its particularity to the extent that it ceases to be indistinguishable from mental space on the one hand, and physical space on the other.”¹¹ Somehow “both more and less than a concept,” low theory is the “surround” following Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.¹² It cannot be named, caught, categorized, or disciplined because it “is a way of thinking about how we can change things.”¹³

We find low theory radiating from anarchist texts and queer art. It is “play and improvisation,”¹⁴ “a kind of feeling,”¹⁵ “plunderphonics.”¹⁶ It is the Situationist dérive, but it is also remix, “culture jamming,”¹⁷ and “the ancient writing technology, the palimpsest.”¹⁸ Low theory is collage, the poetry of bringing things together, the passionate pursuit of what is felt to be right against what may be expected. Low theory intentionally introduces noise into the signal, to scramble any recognition of the message, to “encourag[e] idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations.”¹⁹ It is cut-and-paste fragment philosophy that moves through multiple sources all at once in attempts to put forward something “utopistically” new, with a deep recognition that anything made to appear new never is, is actually the product of shared, collective, relational labour, and violence of the many, across time—not some dehistoricized singular.²⁰

Contra exclusion and cleanliness, low theory gives us a process that “detaches itself from prescriptive methods, fixed logics, and epistemes; [it] orients us toward problem-solving knowledge or social visions of a radical justice.”²¹ Unlike “elitist genealogy that people plug into,” low theory embraces the so-called “counterhegemonic” and practises “undisciplined knowledge production,” if that means a middle finger to the canon and doing whatever we need to do, however it can be done.²² We do need space to dream, space to gather, space to be seen, feel free—but low theory is about the emergent, the overflow, and the refusal of objectivity that is always in excess. This rings true to my own experience of how literal space to be together can teach ways to break through to the realm of real possibility: can teach a kind of method from “the under and around, that refuge, hacked out of thickening air, this other city, underlit, undergoverned.”²³

“As long as there is an entity called high theory, even in casual use or as shorthand for particular traditions, there is an implied field of low theory.”²⁴ Why? Simply because “the standard modes of exchanging knowledge limit what can be thought and what can happen.”²⁵ A kind of self-censorship, “high theory” can be understood as those forms of sense-making that are established, embedded, and canonized by power such as the academy, heritage, legacy, and the physically sharp structure of a book spine. Across diverse systems of power, “high theory” consistently presents as a philosophical kind of closure, a requirement of comprehensibility before recognition. This separation creates a new surface. Some sort of value appears because the thing becomes “legible” and this value becomes the exceptionally violent basis of power.²⁶ Such abstracted legibility inaugurates a fantasy of categorization and order that serves power’s interests.

Private property and closure have always been bedfellows. Both present a false conceptual neatness abstracted from actuality. Enclosure means the becoming “legible, taxable, assessable, and confiscatable,” those processes that enable “integrat[ion] and monetiz[ation of] people, lands, and resources.”²⁷ Of course, the logic of private property is faulty: Nozick’s notion of “original acquisition” is premised in the trees and yet they have no original value; “justice in transfer” forgets social reproduction, forgets real life, forgets the air, the oceans.²⁸ Enclosure creates a boundary of differentiation that can be counted from the outside—as if to be contained²⁹—but internally this equates to an emptiness, much like the surreal abstraction of a Rawlsian subject, stripped of particularity yet equipped with a disembodied reason that enables a false objectivity.³⁰

The imposition of a structure of “rightness” becomes a trait of our caricatured “high theory.” The consequence is a foreclosure of what can be thought. But, “actual rethinking is only ever produced by manipulating one’s surroundings, recursively appropriating its parts, and assembling them to form a new whole.”³¹ Fixity embeds a kind of permanence. McKenzie Wark, again: “the conceit of private property is that it is something fixed, eternal. Once it comes into existence it remains, passed in an unbroken chain of ownership from one title-holder to the next. Yet in the course of time whole cities really do disappear. We live among the ruins.”³² If all we can do is smash the Overton Window, then smash it we must, so we may see beyond, see outside, find ourselves, find the surround. The Liberal dream is over; history never ended. The predictive modelling of a stable world has already demonstrated its irrelevance.

To resist closure is to imminently express creative autonomy in indeterminate ways, a spontaneous expansion across and beyond the vectors and plateaus of our wildest dreams. To seek the beyond is to cast aside clarity, and choose instead “the journey into the unknown without the reassuring distinction between what is and what is not.³³ This “low theory”—“a critical thought indifferent to the institutional”—maneuvers in the great outside.³⁴ Its very productive assembly presents a threat to power’s unquenchable desire for control. The honest iconoclasm of the street will always erode certainty and risk management; it reveals there is no such thing as a history that is settled, despite what the Law may say.

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Low theory traverses the grit of the everyday as it does the metaphysical entanglement of epistemology, ontology, and ethics. It is a kind of making-sense in spite and despite the conditions, the discernment before the action, a construction of new logics beyond the horizon provided by the status quo. It rejects those “sedimented ontological dualisms inaugurated by hegemonic post-Enlightenment thought—e.g., distinctions between spirit and matter, nature and culture, life and death.”³⁵ Though the long talons of power may continue reaching for the deep, we retain the generative engine of creative agency: it’s the moment when the rebel says, “No!” but it is also a recognition that “the only way out is through.”³⁶

Contrary to any zero-sum view of the world, “the post-Situationist legacy of borrowing and correcting is intended to encourage more takings and leave-takings.”³⁷ It’s “the discipline of indiscipline, as the anarchists say. A scholarly practice of pleasure, of play, that opens to expansive need, in selves and others.”³⁸ Low theory is the always-already, listening ear that both presupposes and invites sound, relaid to the hip, not-yet moving, but always ready to sway. With its refusal to think of “all the relations in our life as part of the market economy,”³⁹ low theory seeks the utopian “dream of reclaiming our sense of ourselves as citizens in a culture that insists on reducing us to consumers.”⁴⁰ It welcomes all attempts without expectation; to participate in the doing, to acknowledge, to express recognition, to act.

In low theory, “what” we're doing is reckoning with being, “how” we are doing it is by any means necessary. Because there are stakes, such an openness to method cannot undermine the quality of our discernment. To chart new horizons across disparate and “eccentric texts that refuse to conform to hierarchies of knowing” requires an even deeper, more difficult reading.⁴¹ It is different every time, must constantly been re-cognized, and remains specific and particular in its demonstration that another way is possible. Of course you are already making your own sense of the world: affective legitimacy occurs at all levels of understanding and in ways that may yet be recognizable to any categorizable form.

If it has an aesthetic at all, low theory is a disguise that protects and inaugurates its own value, a garbage aesthetic literally built out of the waste—grotesque and awesome—a reconfiguration of the matter buried in the landfill or yet destined for it.⁴² In this way, it's grimy, but purity does not exist—the slippage is generative; filth is ubiquitous. There is no profit motive, but there must remain an engagement with the specific and an acknowledgement of the middle (finger) from which we start.

Low theory is appropriation, it is the kind act of stealing from everywhere and everyone that happens by being alive. “[I]t is everything we do when we are trying our best from under the oppressive structures of the state and capital.”⁴³ It is a way of turning dominant narratives “against themselves… to reverse or subvert their meaning, thus reclaiming them.”⁴⁴ And after all, “all culture is derivative.”⁴⁵ This methodology of decontextualizing disparate parts to create anew is the pragmatic urge of do-it-yourself that sees potential in the materials within which we are embedded. It calls us to really look around, to really pay attention, to remember that “we were good already in the mutual debt that can never be made good.”⁴⁶ This space is fragile, but we do not need to turn to ownership or property to resolve these ethical questions. As Erica Lagalisse writes, “we may also lose something in the process of applying the logic of property to culture,” whereby appropriating “without the intended content is entirely in line with the logic of capitalist colonialism, but so is marking off and containing everything considered sacred as property (and thus nothing more.)”⁴⁷ It is therefore critical to recognize the legacies that bring us together. Our metaphysical reality takes place in the shadow of sediment that spans millennia, and we are all implicated.

Our being multiple is a kind of unpredictability born of cooperation that jars the beat of the predictable. Caught “in the act,”⁴⁸ bodies maintain their rhythmic momentum in a “blending, edgeless dance”⁴⁹ that could be mistaken as an electric catalyst—an interaction that invokes a world to come. Low theory is Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus and Gillian Rose’s Angelus Dubiosus, but they are at a rave.⁵⁰ Both painted by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920) and Angelus Dubiosus (1939) are two of an extended series developed throughout Klee's life. Rose recalls Walter Benjamin’s analogy to Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus in her discussion of melancholia, and presents her own Angel as a symbol of inaugurated mourning. Let us bring them together and suggest an alternative dialectic.

With a restricted palette, Angelus Novus depicts a line drawn angel afloat sepia tones. To Walter Benjamin, this is the Angel of History, a figure propelled into the future by forces that exceed its own agency to see beyond the unfolding catastrophe of history: mesmerized by disaster, the winds send us forward. Rose challenges this tragic anti-hero, suggesting this is instead a figure caught in its own unhelpful “theoretical melancholia.”⁵¹ “Standing alone,” Angelus Novus is frozen in shock, unable to do the active work of mourning that living requires; of course, time passes and history is a catastrophe, but all is not lost.⁵² In response, Rose introduces Angelus Dubiosus, an angel more abstract, colourful: a vision of momentum. “[W]ith voluminous, blue, billowing and enfolded wings in which square eye-holes are cut for the expanse of rotund, taupe flesh, to gaze through, this molelike angel appears unguarded rather than intent, grounded and slack rather than backing up and away in rigid horror.”⁵³ Angelus Dubiosus delivers the comedy of inaugurated mourning: the rhythmic forward and backward interplay of mistake, fault, failure, and persistent revelation; a colourful figure marked by its own complicity in the horrors of the world.

What if these two (in)finite bodies met? Angelus Novus and Angelus Dubiosus, their surfaces blurring “on an overlit floor… a miasma of fog and sweat?”⁵⁴ What if they overcame their separation, even if just for a moment? Let go of any fantasy of mending the world, accepting an insecure peace with each other, lost themselves as known ontological boundaries evaporated only to condense into a new form? To attempt to risk reassociation despite escaping articulation? This is a kind of letting go that is “about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection.”⁵⁵ The fantasy of separation and togetherness is exchanged for the ineffability of a doing and being that surpasses any litigious boundary.

What if low theory is the imperfect collective subject and the space it inaugurates, if only temporarily? “That there are no words for where we go is maybe the sign that we’re on our own, but on our own together, trying to find the ways we can endure the end of this world.”⁵⁶ Let us make sense from this site of mutual subversive re-appropriation, with its surprising balance of silly and serious. “There is no calculus of the terror that can make a proper calculation without reference to that which resists it. It’s just not possible.”⁵⁷ The state of the world is intolerable and yet so too it is beautiful and abundant: nothing is so simple.

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Instead of ownership, we approach the commons: the active and collaborative re-appropriation of everything, because low theory practices a different economy. There may be a presupposition of trust in there somewhere, the possibility of a generous human condition, but low theory welcomes the jump. What if, against the depth of our contemporary “metaphysical nihilism,” faith was held?⁵⁸

If we must renounce everything, then let us be a knight of faith: specifically Gillian’s, not Soren’s.⁵⁹ We continue to try over and over again—never the retreat but rather a committed and recurrent transformational engagement with the contradictory muck of the world. It is Sisphyus but it is also much more ancient than that. This repetition is the motion of being—rather than existentialist masturbation and nihilistic despair, it is a generative movement, a fruiting, a coming-into-being, the emergence of a moving montage.

Contrary to any premise of individuation as the first law in European philosophical tradition, the first law is our entangled state with its many implications.⁶⁰ Caught in the middle, our condition inaugurates a reproductive labour that has no start and no end. For Gillian Rose, this is the “broken middle.” And following Rose, Marks writes that “to love is to successfully read the relations that tie oneself to others not as formal relations that sit apart from their participants… but as concrete relations that are as malleable, fungible as they are absolute.”⁶¹ This love is direct social reproduction, discerned on our own terms, always moveable and never settled. It is not quantifiable. It is the in-between that is always changing and it is the residue we pick up and leave behind.

Marilyn Waring reminds us that care work is the basis of any economy despite its evasion of quantification.⁶² Social reproduction keeps things going—the dutiful schedule of domesticity with all its foresight and prophecy. To be together in community is our genealogy, though of course such a connection is never settled and requires on-going attention. Ernst Bloch sees the insurmountable drive of utopia akin to hunger: “a deep sense that something’s missing [though] this lack cannot be articulated other than through imagining its fulfilment.”⁶³ We, as embodied beings, always require food—this banal truth is a recurrent and yet satiable quality of the material body. We get hungry, we eat, we are satiated, we get hungry again, we eat… Regardless of having eaten prior, caught in the passage of time and without regard to specificity, we must again eat.

Strong networks of cooperation, community, and mutual aid are always intentional happenings, and yet the excess of this collective doing preserves its ineffability, its health, its being-always-more-than-what-can-be-named. Low theory aspires to the work of right relation, of justice, if “justice is what love looks like in public.”⁶⁴ Themis is a woman, and lest we forget the gendered legacy and labour of social reproduction of the Western tableau. Allowing ourselves to look further beyond the preordained, we may uncover new “legacies of autonomy.”⁶⁵ This also brings a kind of “cognitive justice,” a “look[ing] more closely at what is already there; it urges us to harness the untapped potential of existing ways of knowing and seeing that have been dismissed by those who hold power.”⁶⁶

Themis. With one hand, the silk-draped goddess holds at bay the collapse of everything: the scales of impartiality. She is a cognizant-situated-being, an original god capable of a practical realism both balanced and measured; a suspension of judgement, the gift of reproduction, complexity acknowledged, categorized. Her other hand, outstretched with poise, wields a sword—clarity of perception and sharp insight, expectation of wise discernment, and persistent, reliable delivery. Her likeness adorns courthouse walls, a blindfolded pin-up in servitude to the Law. She is the symbol of justice but never justice herself, “as if a distinction between is and ought rendered ought illegitimate.”⁶⁷ But we know better.

Low theory takes us back to the whenua, to toes in the soil and minds in the clouds. It reveals again and again that the stability of our world connects what is and what may be, but this relationship itself is “up for grabs.”⁶⁸ There will always be different stakes, but it is also possible to discern the specifics of circumstance.⁶⁹ There will always be more to consider because to start is to acknowledge we're already in the middle, dirty from the day just past and hungry from the time spent. But mutual aid relies on a duty to engage—an ethic—the moral claim that we need each other. And low theory is the deep relationality that quilts us together and continues to keep us warm. It is the many meals we will eat together over and over again; the labour of the harvest as well as the feast.⁷⁰

Though we are bodies, in thought we err towards prophecy and change, touch an original agency, imagine so that we may become. There is an oscillation between the particular and the absolute. Two or more positions are always held at once, but in the jump it is somehow possible to find balance. May we “keep our mind in hell but despair not.”⁷¹ Sensibilities that strengthen our muscles to hold what is and move forward can only ever be an empowering process. After all, “the real object of production has always been the world.”⁷²

No theory is sufficient without practice, and these speculative ideas took form for me in Pōneke Wellington over the past five years through the work of 5ever books, in the shared community house of 13 Garrett Street, in Rebel Press, and in the emergent community of the Whatever Palace. In Ōtepoti Dunedin, I see this mahi in Yours. These spaces house “autonomous infrastructures of social reproduction”⁷³ and reflect a persistent and insurmountable drive to community and assembly. These years have been sideways, the real “space” is so much more than anything we thought or did together.

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Low theory “restores [to] the fragment the status of being a recognizable part of the process of the collective production of meaning in the present, through its recombination into a new meaningful experience.”⁷⁴ We are the undercurrent and the lens and the glue that holds these fragments together and, in doing so, we are ourselves gesturing to a totality: this excess is the productive force of low theory. What it means to be so fragmented is that to know anything means crossing many boundaries. We move, we make, we effect, we bring forth, we create, we eat, we breathe. Outstretched left limb, hand on end of arm, holding nihilism at bay; to the right, a beckoning of otherwise signalled in a skilful open palm.

The irony is that low theory now appears some sort of absolute, a return to those philosophies which have “social import.”⁷⁵ Low theory is direct social reproduction discerned on our own terms. It is not precious. Though it starts by its own incompleteness, it proceeds as if to completing itself knowing full well the futility of such a quest. The mismatch between is and ought is some sort of comedy, a refusal of wholeness that nevertheless contains the very idea and possibility of wholeness. The blur of two bodies, energized and indistinguishable, if but for a moment.

The truth is, we are always making implicit judgements that shape the world, and we can always effect those judgements. And so, the task remains to pay attention. Whatever this impulse may be, it is the communion of mutual aid, it is many hands taking care over and over upon the unseen battle ground of everyday life, a pattern, a prophecy. May we sense when “a passage begins and on what note it ends in order to make it connect,” together “listen[ing] for the openings in [other] passages,” to “adjust to the movement that is already underway [because the] passage [will] read differently depending on the moment you choose to insert it; other words come to stand out in light of what has gone before.”⁷⁶

Because, make no mistake—low theory is a strategy of resistance as much as a commitment to survival.