The Star of Theory

John Powers essay “star wars: a new heap” in Triple Canopy is theory in its most productive state, one of total activation. In this state, the object of inquiry (in this case Star Wars) is not the end but both the end and the starting point of the theory machine. The object tells us not so much about itself but the all of it, the conditions of its happening, of its coming to be. It tells us everything, and everything tells us about itself.

One of my favorite passages:

The Death Star is a flying saucer that has been inflated to the size of a moon. Like the minimalist art it resembles, the Death Star is a utopia stripped of all progressive justification: It has monastic barracks, its sexuality is defined negatively (see Darth Vader’s masochistic garb), and its entryway is a breach in the “equatorial trench.”1 In contrast, the other saucer in Star Wars [the Millennium Falcon] is a filthy “incremental city” of jury-rigged hand-me-downs.2 This seedy saucer accommodated the details of everyday life, replete with drinking, gambling, sexual flirtation, and bickering. It harbors all the chaos of the unplanned street: rebel scum, smugglers, hicks and hermits, all navigating their own lives for good or ill.

Here cleanliness is not close to God but to evil. The opposite of purity is life, the good. To get to this point, this conclusion, the real nature of evil and good, the theory machine activates modernism, science fiction, architecture, biology, theology—anything that can be processed or process is processed or processes. This is total activation.