what: the synkar guarantee is the way to tell if a theory book contains actual theory or not. this genius method was developed by henri schliktigar in 2003, but andrej synkar, just zero years old at that point, stole it and ran away with it, taking all the credit and fame that comes with being such an esteemed reviewer. alright, i’ll try to be serious about this.
synkar’s certification for pure theory
synkar’s guarantee for quality theory
synkar’s guarantee for quality research
synkar’s disavowal
faq
what actually is this? (answer: gatekeeping but maybe less evil than usual)
i am gatekeeping philosophy by dividing it into theory and cultural studies. the former is a glorification and the latter is a pejorative. its somewhat structural, but also somewhat biased to what i think theory should look like or what it should be about. cultural research is seen as something derivative, generalized, overly academic, doesnt make use of its references correctly. it looks like a study, like its just too archetypical in the way it uses language. its not ambitious enough, the voice is not developed enough, it isnt original enough. you get it now? because im not saying, ok, pick between anthropology and theory, we are deciding inside of theory itself what counts as theory.
why do i use the term theory, and who pissed me off? (answer: because the english speaking world stole the term critical. same answer for the second question)
there may be a million disciplines in philosophy, but there are really only two, the theoretical (also known as the speculative or conceptual), and the mode of study, known as scholastics, anthropology or recently branded as “cultural, literary, [thematic]” studies of any kind. plenty of disciplines may exist in philosophy, but it doesn’t matter how interrelated and multidisciplinary they are if they’re all structurally useless and weightless, they may as well be the same discipline. i make use of the word theory rather than critical theory precisely because the anglophone world stole the term critical to refer to normative moral discourses that are full of ragebait and justice-oriented polemics than any actual intellectual innovation. now, it’s likely this statement produced certain anxieties in the reader, who may at this point be worrying about their own work, or the work they enjoy being structurally useless.
am i absolutely sure we’re not all just idiots without taste? (answer: its true that we may be idiots without taste, but philosophy itself isnt and thats enough)
the truth is, i’d love it if it were true, lyotard diagnosing the world with the inability to judge for a good reason, where we only have truncated, affective rather than clinical judgements remaining - but, no, don’t worry, i still know good from bad theory. the reason i say i and not you is because, well, i’m not so sure about you anymore. it’s getting really bad out here, and not because publishers aren’t producing good works, but because audiences are becoming, simply, idiots, but in the bad, non dostoyevsky, non deleuzian way. they arent just becoming de-professionalized, which is actually amazing, but they are becoming incapable of discerning quality, largely because nobody exists to decide what is and isnt quality. and i don’t promise to make it easy, but if you read the next fifteen paragraphs and look at all my examples, it may make slightly more (or less) sense.
does my divide even exist or is it basically impossible to tell theory apart from fragmented discourses nowadays? (answer: its really easy to tell, most of the times you can tell just by the title, but thats not because of thematic organization but because most topics tend to be beaten to death before anyone starts writing about them, and trust me, its not the topic’s fault)
when it comes to the community it is true, audiences really are incapable of coming to grander judgements, but when it comes to philosophy we’re still safe, in that, i’m sure you almost certainly know what is and isnt trashy theory, i can guarantee it, and i am doing that with the synkar guarantee. in fact you could name it right now, think about the last theory book you read that behaved as if it were great (as most do because they have nothing else going for them but to perform greatness when they lack it) but was really just some absolute horseshit. now, come to realize that that’s most theory books you’ve actually ever read. they start off with a grand idea or theme, but as you open them, you’re hit with a bunch of names, a whole, useless fucking wall of names. why did you go to read about “revolutionary transfusionalism” but end up with “gabrielle letto’s thoughts on the infraconstrumper in response to the movie free nights” and an entire analysis of cold war era debates on thermonuclear diconstrunators and also something about the extinction of blue elephants in north siberia? its because theory is nearly dead, clinging onto a bunch of french corpses to produce its books for it, and a whole world of thousands of useless english people who can’t tell their own head from their ass.
now, i know what you’re thinking, am i a supremacist? are all cultural studies useless? (answer: basically no, what matters is that we dont forget what theory is, not whether we spend our time not actually doing it)
fuck no! who do you take me for? the reason the synkar guarantee is so valuable to me is because it isn’t easy. i don’t just look at a book thats over-referenced and under-conceptualized and come to a whim realization. well, okay, sometimes i do exactly that because i’ve opened thousands of them and can tell by the very language occasionally. but occasionally that isnt enough. and also, does this mean non-theory itself is invaluable to theory or automatically in poor taste? nope. it means its really, genuinely hard to come to a conclusion sometimes. but whats important is that its still fine to read and even write non-theory if you’re a theorist, what matters is that we dont accidentally lose our direction and own ability to write it, not that we humble it. i’ll often rank cultural studies books higher than actual theory books, and thats perfectly reasonable. its reasonable because, if you’re a theorist, you’ll realize that sometimes you may even write a cultural studies work on accident, autistic interests can carry us over into producing something too cleansed to actually move discourse in any way.
how can i tell if a theory book is actually just cultural studies? (quick answer: look at the text, if it has a lot of names that the ideas look like theyre hiding behind rather than making use of, its just studying. this isnt easy to always tell but good luck)
cultural studies are usually legitimized as philosophy because of epistemic weaponization, where they argue they are radical, innovative and valuable due to the form of knowledge produced, the quality and depth of the work, and the themes the work carries across. for example, constructive intent, researched and verified peers being cited in the field and ambitiously coined terms usually allow it to embed itself in so-called “critical pursuits”, but realistically, if you view the structure of the text, it’s full of pointless references, concepts are made use of in the form of terms rather than the layered drivers of the text they need to be for it to count as theory, the sentences are short, way too intentional and not even nearly deep enough to significantly impact the reader. usually this is a direct four step way to tell the uselessness of a theory text: 1) is it anglophone? 2) is it very easy to read, almost as if you’re reading fiction? 3) is it making use of common sense formulations? 4) is it embedded in existing discourses in a way where even if you’re staring dead at the cover you can’t tell what makes this one special? 5) upon opening, is it studying stuff? is it just talking and talking endlessly about who said what? if it fulfills any two of these criteria, then it isn’t theory, sorry.
what makes it so hard to write actual theory, then? (answer: basically you need to be a real person [rare] but also a total abstraction so that you can write enough to matter. somehow landing at both of these spots at once is really hard)
what makes the heideggerian pursuit of historical spirit so important, in the sense that real quality becomes something we ought to discern, judge and figure out, live through, rather than simply immediately arrive at and partake in? it’s important because it’s something you fight to actually gain, you don’t become a theorist overnight, but you could very easily become a scholar overnight. in fact, most scholars do become scholars overnight, because it takes them about one night to write the garbage they usually need to. and then they stop “being” scholars for the remainder of their non-scholarly existence, because scholastics is a cheap performative gesture and not a real theoretical pursuit. they aren’t characters moving through existence with genuine wonder and the real lived capacity to turn that into a large, intricate structure of thought, but rather - they’re automatons stuck in reproductive logic. why? because they hail from the great cathedral, which collapsed moral rhetoric and intellectual capacity into a cesspool of authorization and legitimacy.
who’s fault is it that theory went from hegel and deleuze to “a post-oriental perspective on washing machines and their effects on reproducing the logic of war in post-may 68 lithuania, and also, trump is evil”? (answer: moldbug’s cathedral and maybe christianity, and also in contemporary times the fact that almost everyone is a neoliberal for some reason)
the reproduction of derivative theory exists primarily because of institutional logic, which embeds it through the disciplinary codification of philosophy as commentary, wiring it into the complex of cultural and social capital, embedding it into authorization rituals, humiliating it along the way, and then delivering it as a useless finished product, truncated from all meaning. philosophy is primarily a liturgical practice, meaning that it depends on the voice of the narrator to carry it across. it doesnt matter what this voice is, be it affective, cold-pan, straight-delivered, cynical or diffusive, what matters is that it fulfills structural criteria that enact it as philosophy, primarily an abstract and depersonalized carriage of conceptual drivers, a narrative that pushes a groundless storyline underneath the delivery, a propulsive discourse that drives both the messenger, the reader and the predecessors into a discursive field (this is where the thinker is free to choose his voice), and an original ambition that fulfills a set criteria of enacted themes and ideas that emerge from existing language practices, with the goal of commenting on something in a manner that pursues ontological and rhetorical weight. this is really what it means for a concept to have a language, a face and a territory, this isn’t just an idea, this is what we’re dealing with.
how come institutions sometimes helped theorists then? (answer: they didnt do shit, philosophy cults make use of their resources because they are economically non-viable but otherwise too profound to be contained)
the move from derivative knowledge to automatically derivative knowledge began in the late scholastic and enlightenment university model. the reason a lot of institutional intellectuals can still write theory is because german idealists, french poststructuralists, frankfurt schoolers and so fourth made use of their institutions as conceptual laboratories where there was still a living metaphysical tension between philosophy and its limit conditions (theology, literature, science). in the contemporary anglophone world, the institution is primarily archival, creating no agnostic circuits, no ability to genuinely cross-link ideas.. it’s not that they’re quite literally computers incapable of deeper or more interesting thinking, but in a certain sense they are, because the crypt has not only reserved but very slowly evolved its capacities, and its capacities are extremely dense private language which can only be learned by executing repeatedly, it takes the reproduction of certain heightened structural forms and capacities of language, so that every word that you utter has not just weight but more importantly intrigue, so that it genuienly stands out and offers power in it or through it, so that it reflects an unmistakable ambitious pursuit, so that it attaches to discourses in a way that feels like its hitting the mark on something cruical.
you act tough but your own books aren’t peer-reviewed, are you scared little boy? (answer: you confuse institutional authorization for cultural legitimacy, of which i have a lot of precisely because i am who i am and not the other way around)
as the world gets increasingly larger and more satured, language itself gets filled up with all the extra useless weight the world is producing, so that the carriers of language themselves only serve to replicate it as a sovereign impulse and code of transmission rather than something with any actual use to it, they just serve to send networks of goobledy junk around, and they know it, or they wouldnt be so afraid of actually engaging in it. for them, language is the medium for everything else, including morality, or they wouldnt be so scared of the power of actual words. they’re only engaged in language so that they can acquire cultural capital, which is itself a reflection of their childish desire for comfort and stability. for the cathedral, discourse is managed through citation, specialization, and review—modes of verification with no conceptual risk, where discourse is replicated and methods are maintained. why did continental theorists with actual value stress subversion so hard? subversion itself is the guarantee for quality, because it entirely avoids stepping into territories that replicate anthropological scholasticism. it is extremely easily for passionate thinkers to be swept under the rug, in the sense, of a promise of higher ordeals that never actually ends in satisfaction. satisfaction, real curiosity in theory is not itself a good metric to determine theory, because its quite possible the scholastic automatons have coded themselves in a way where their limit for satisfaction is easy. but real bataillean excess is the cruical limit-point that lets you know you have character, but more importantly, are a messenger of god, who requires us to transmit the mythologically divine pagan universal morality-killer. god is the furthest from salvation, he is interested in theory, something that can help understand why morality is a curse instead of a principle.
”its 2025, not 1850, what do you expect me to do, start writing mystical tracts again? its fine for the world to be more boring right now, for fucks’s sake” (answer: no, history doesnt actually stop us at all from the inside, only from the outside)
you might think this is extremely difficult to recreate in normal circumstances, but in fact, its extremely easily. all it takes is purpose and stakes. how hard is it to manufacture purpose and stakes? very easy. all you have to do is stand up, look around you, figure out what you want to get mad at, sit back down, read interesting texts, and write something new about it that isnt just describing the events you just understood but actively innovating their conditions. this isn’t difficult, anyone in the world can do it. the reason they don’t is because they don’t feel the need to. common sensicality is an auto-immune condition of the world, not its natural state. all this implies is that we exist in a world that can’t push itself forward, a drained, suspended enviornment, which destroys the romantic luxury you would want to afford the universe. i don’t just mean this colloquially, i mean it exactly - the existence of the mundane, trashy oversatured domain of social perpetuation literally ruins the beauty of the world for everyone, those who are involved in theory included. i can barely stand almost everyone involved in this world, you’ve ruined the world by overcrowding it with your junk because there is no way for valuable expressions to circulate in a way that substantially alters them, dooming everyone who is interesting left in perpetual cycles of misery because of it. we will make sure to pay you back for this later.
is this text itself theory then? (answer: no, because its polemics dont reach the point of required ontological density)
no. this text is neither theory nor cultural studies, its just a form of strategic comedy that explains polemically what the stakes are. but it can look like theory. why didnt i write theory for this page instead? well, i might, but its far more important that the general public at least somewhat understands whats going on. why is not theory? there are parts of it that are theoretical in nature and make use of particular tropes, but the theory is cut short by the polemic and the constant address to an audience. it also doesnt deal with problems in a genuine manner, it just circles around them, its self-reflexive. theory requires use of advanced language in actually deployed contexts, and in that sense, a lot of discoursive arguments even in continental or queer circles are way too affective to guarantee conceptual deployment. theory isnt just the ability to meta-reflect with certain language layers, it requires a certain aura or atmosphere to actually propel itself forward. conceptual deployments need to be sharp, constant, oscillating, layered, scaffolded, dense, nuanced and everything in between. basically, ontological density is a real qualifying mark. whats actually the problem is that it doesnt treat problems. it basically isnt about anything other than itself, which makes it so that its auto trivial. theory needs to pass through a system of discursive relevancy, even trivially so. a purely meta pursuit doesnt need to do that - it can bypass layers of theoretical augmentation. augmentation isnt an authorization ritual but a genuine level of required embededness that isnt easy to surpass, theory needs to achieve intense amounts of generative excess and self-compelling, self-compounded relevancy to enter the status of original thought.
why can a text like this appear theoretical even if it isnt? (answer: because it mimics the structure but isnt in the right register)
for example, it makes use of “synkar guarantee,” “the cathedral,” “reproductive logic,” “theoretical/scholastic divide”, which are neologisms that become metaphysically and discoursively incapsulated into the actual polemic, which is the exact same mechanism that theory itself uses to propulse concepts forward. it also contains self-referential systematicity, because the text keeps returning to its previous concerns, which is known as recursive scaffolding, a trademark of theoretical work. it appears because of my training, however, in this text its low density and generally void of actual intricacies, because polemics often throw away functional cohesion in favor of immediate rhetorical strenght. it also shows things like metaphysical critique of political structures, syntactic propulsion and meta-discursive authority (speaking from above the situation).
what makes theory truly, really unique? (answer: density as autonomy and character as novelty)
its extremely easy to create self-generative loops of thought if you’re a practiced thinker, but theory is a step above all of that, and you can actually tell the difference of quality, and in that sense language is exactly like a craft of its own. usually poets and fictionalists take their craft to be art when it really is auto-quantitative reproduction rather than deployed quantitative reproduction. what i mean by that is that theory itself is also auto-reporducable, that quality itself has a quantitative dimension, but its precisely in places like theory where it unmistakably appears that true qualitification is impossible, not because of the language structure but because of the pure level of excess and originality required. everything that bypasses a certain border is auto-theoretical to the point where you dont need to wonder what border it is, but precisely to contain the generative power to get there. theory is stacking the ability to reflectively and densely think, but in full layers, the exact opposite of the zizek approach. the more compounded and complicated the interaction, the higher of a chance that its theoretical in nature. all cultural studies does is abuse names, but theory doesnt need to rely on the name, only on the technical function of the language, to reproduce private languages, and thats what makes it powerful, theory, in its natural state, is literally unmemorizable, nobody can actually copy any of it from mind the way they could with many other things. theory is by far the hardest form of literary cultural production unless you count things like elite poetry or psychological worldbuilding fictive literature, because it requires genuine expanded character and immense rationalization-abstraction machines to actually even sustain itself.
i still dont get it.
fine, on top of justifying where ive categorized each text, i’ll also give a lot of examples to drive the point home:
examples:
an attempt at text-analysis that studies how meaning self-replicates through form
1. hegel’s phenomenology of spirit synkar’s judgement: theory
the decision to use this text isnt an accident, it just so happens to accidentally be one of those works that attain celebrity status precisely because their structure is so perfect, that philosophical commentators themselves dont understand that the public doesnt understand, but is still responsible for, its promotion not as an absurdity but as an enlightenment. this text is however precisely an absurdity because it is entirely known and defended for exactly what it isnt. its power is in ambiguity, in nuance, in inner contained complexity, not in clean unfolding nor in sustained cohesion. the more functional variations a text has, regardless of if theyre consistent and recursive or constantly exchanged, the more technically complex it is. a text with both ontological depth and syntactic recursion is almost always theoretical in nature, simply because its both difficult and difficultly rare to enter the mindset that allows you to invoke so many inner categories in a yet so consistent manner
2. synkar’s review of lukas’ habitability synkar’s judgement: ambivalent, theory leaning
the decision to use this text was both to expand on how i think ambivalent or borderline texts can simultaneously occupy two zones, to expand on how i am aware that genres in writing influence the status of a text, to the point that i even argue at the bottom that this text is definitively a cultural study purely because of its thematic direction, yet at the same time, to show how a text with certain thematic directions, given that it doesnt abuse referentiality, can hold ontological depth within it even if its doing something banal like a review. some of the examples also point to nuances that expand on what is pure theory vs discoursively degraded vs empirically degraded vs argumentatively cohesive, or otherwise where the text falls flat into its own points before it can sustain its body (some of my texts tend to do that a lot, drop the ontological depth right as theyve started developing it in favor of discoursive, affective or meta functional complexities, which is a bad habit but necessary in a rushed review)
3. bonnet’s infraworld synkar’s judgement: largely borderline, with a slight theoretical preference
© urbanomic, from ‘inframonde/infraworld,’ 2018, used under fair use for scholarly analysis, with limited and cut paragraphs and with transformative notes and markings. this is the only page and it is intentionally cut very short and contains more transformative commentary than original content. please notify me if you want this fragment removed (entirely to be terminated and fully replcaed with a paraphrase instead) nonetheless.
this whole text is tricky precisely because it contains mostly a majority of philosophically generative discourse, however, its speculative and theoretical registers are thin, it mostly trades conceptual analysis with observational remarks mixed with heavily philosophical commentary - which can expand itself as theoretical depending on the way it weaponizes the discourse. bonnet himself makes uncritical (albeit, very exegetically valuable) use of the commentary but makes very critical (as in conceptually engaging) post-discoursive remarks that bridge well with the commentary. the reason this is stated as largely ambivalent is because cultural study of a direct type interesecting with theory makes me generally lean towards considering it as not theoretical in nature.
4. tucker’s liberty synkar’s judgement: ambivalent, cultural studies leaning
this text has conceptual development undoubtedly, even though, just as the previous example, its a polemic. whats even more rare is that it develops an accidental syntactic structure that could very easily have been a conceptually highly complex structure if it wasnt performing political sentiments. an extremely elaborate example, however continously cut short by its common sensicalities. it also features highly recursive narrative scaffolding which is important
5. price’s “do anarchists support democracy?” synkar’s judgement: cultural study
i chose the least ambivalent cultural study possible, in order not to highlight contradictions or borders but to do the opposite, to show readers from which position they can reconsider if every other text is theoretical or cultural. this text is para academic and copyright free, yet it mirrors an academic structure, which is what makes it relevant, because its an authorized discursive form that exists out of free will instead of social necessity, so its a fragment that we can actually use to study scholastic tendencies
