Abstract

Theory suggests a certain means of cleaving closer to the world by arranging a trick of distance from it, to be able to stand back from the onrush of things by attending to a pattern and thus recognising them more deeply. It offers partaking in a dance of expansion and contraction of thought, one of immanence and transcendence twisting and running through each other in recursive yet unrepeatable movement. This range of dynamics is one that may often be frozen, codified, subject to measurements or called to order in numerous ways and which in turn may offer its own sets of tests and cruelties. Yet it has no inherent speed, or necessary scale of operation, but it is the activation of the movement in which it is found. An examination of theory’s trajectories through media ecologies could take a number of turns. One might: follow through the way in which it is articulated through filiations of ideas and genealogies and their relation to specific media; work through the histories of the book and of texts, in technologies, markets and other modes of circulation; trace how transformations are enacted on and through theory by means of politics, technology or wider cultural shifts; or explore how theory sets itself up as a residue catcher of other domains. One might track theory as a kind of peer-reviewed cultural industrial waste, but it may also suffice to pay attention to this movement of theory, and some of the different kinds of revealing faultiness it makes possible. This essay suggests how media theory might think alongside what it gets rather wrong, the phenomena which fuel its capacities of misrecognition and with which it overlaps: to think theory as media in the way that it addresses, modulates, transmits, and provides interference. I propose to do this both through engagement with two writers, Charles Fort and Alfred Jarry, who exemplify certain excellences of error and through analysis of an interesting kind of object characteristic of Cybernetics: thought experiments carried out in hardware.