Chroma realism

asemic horizon says “theory” simpliciter, unqualified, intransitive, a secas to emphasize it is not, nor does it aim to be, a theory of a specific something. In order to diffract into arbitrary chromaticities, it needs to be blank. If incentivized to place theory in an art-world kind of market for attention, I might just incorporate this: blank theory, in consonance with Blank Banshee and Élie Ayache’s Blank Swan.

But that’s not the world I’m living in, is it? I’m instead continually pressed by my persona (and the cognition cluster it circles around) towards the technical. In this aspect my rhetorical flourish has written many checks that theory-as-we-have-her-now can’t fund. We did make some effort towards two entirely different stories, the one based in SATPLAN (since satisfiability-modulo promised to be a fine model for quability, that most elusive of birds) and the one realized as PDEs-in-graphs but ultimately founded in the algebraic-combinatorial construction of space. There’s still nothing to properly link either of these to the core content of theory, let alone to its high points (tempo, physique du rôle, diegesis…). If pressed to produce any cogent account of theory in the universe of intellectual pursuits that animates the people who are able to grok theory in place, I’d have to confess and defend it as informal theory. The wording is unfortunately mainly because the informal meaning of “informal” has to do with letting your guard down; but even taken seriously, it points to a gap, a hole: if it doesn’t want to be an informal theory of something, it has to clarify the role of its in-formalism.

The disciplines of rigorous informal analysis take the name of engineering. Software engineering, because focused on dancing around the glitch, is a particularly illustrative example: while methods of formal verification exist, most software is informal because it grows out of pressing desiderata. Rigor in engineering flows down, and if something (say: PID controllers) runs out of rigor in its mathematical derivation, well, then it runs out of rigor. If it seems odd to consider engineering as a peer to theory, it’s because the desidrata of theory seem to grow from within theory. At any rate, we need tempo, quability, ambit…

The emergence of chroma(ticity)/chrema(tistics) as generalized pairs of axiological articulation had to do with a kind of sobriety crisis around the apparent (within my budgets of time and energy, at least) un-formalizeability of theory. Chroma only came to to the foreground when we had to take stock of whatever we had as formal tools (some remain good, like the opposition/corruption diagram and the finite-circular style of argument around the concept of distinction). That silly business around half-axiologies looked good in its austere wittgeinsteinian style: but meant nothing. To repeat: chroma was revealed to us because we dared to rest in informality — which is still a weak spot, mind you; but one that may be with us for a long time.

What chroma enlightens (colors, irradiates, filters through) is that we’re stuck in informal theory because the greater goal is concept theory. And since there’s an important leap of abstraction between conceptual theory (which is always a high-abstraction theory of some X) and concept theory itself, this is likely to be the second-best signifier for theory in the lack of a shared semantic environment that allows for the proper “fixpoint” diction of theory = f(theory).

Now, what’s incredible about chroma is that it provides an ambit for the glitch. This, at least to me, is remarkable: these three ideas were not conceived for each other, Almost all of the matter of theory fits, clicks together, self-organized and self-systemizes (enough that we can leave behind old bits that don’t fit, let them starve and rot). In this way — meaning, if we conceive theory as the theory of the matter of theory — the chroma/chrema distinction collapses. The ultimate chrema of theory is to make it click. The penultimate ethical, strategic, technical, sexual, etc. move is to steer clear of this collapse.

This is how one avoids getting lost in the woods, and rather strategized to gain little pieces of new ground here and there: chroma realism. (This is also what Jair was epsilon-close to for quite a while. Jair was never leader material or a Great Man of any kind, but he almost became a conduit for truth-rain, a peculiarly sweet form of chromaticity).

[NB: please be mindful of the I/we voices; they’re distinct.]