There’s a certain kind of approach to theory that functions less like thought and more like a hall of mirrors.
Dense, seductive, and often completely detached from the material conditions they claim to critique.
They give fledgling thinkers just enough poetry to feel smart, but not enough clarity to act – an opium of the petit bourgeois.
Philosophy becomes a slogan.
Design becomes a posture.
Aesthetics replace politics.
Exhibitions of “work” priced at hundreds of thousands of rands, commenting on the post-colonial experience, while the person affected by these conditions cannot afford and doesn’t have access to experience these aforementioned works.
Theory, art and the humanities become a mood board of revolution, curated for exhibitions, gallery walls and lecture halls - that function more like instruments of conversation than sites of social transformation.
Meanwhile, the so-called “less intellectual” and “out of touch” students, those in business schools and policy departments, take control of the engines of power.
They learn the world as it is: legislation, jurisprudence, executive infrastructure, banks,
trade, logistics, media-capture, most importantly, power. They run it. The philosophers, activists, artists, and theorists, by contrast, write slogans and talk to each other in exclusive circles while the systems they critique remain untouched.
“They don’t want victory, they don’t want power, they want to endlessly critique power.”
In contemporary culture, materialism is treated as vulgar and Anglo-American.
Theory and activism must be metaphysical, tragic, and self-reflexive, but that refusal to engage the mechanisms of the world, markets, supply chains, and digital infrastructures is not sophistication. It’s evasion.
You’d learn more about how the world works watching a Marvel movie than attending a design graduate seminar on “post-human aesthetics.” Marvel is imperial realism. It tells you exactly what the West is, what it desires, and what it fears - The West as Saviour / Central Force of Order, Glorification of Surveillance, Tech, and Militarism, Mythologising “Good” Interventionism.
We begin here not out of contempt, but out of necessity.
Theory and Praxis in the material machines of production should not be divorced locations of practice, but two points we constantly relay between, each one a checkpoint the other must pass through to continue moving.
If we are to build something from the margin to achieve this magazine, this design practice, this cultural machine, it cannot begin strictly with inherited tools that refuse to touch the ground.
We don’t want to play with theory alone, we want to use it, bend it, drag it into contact with lived experience, economic constraint, and cultural invention.
The English language is violence; we will hotwire it.
We will master the master's tools to destroy what he has built.
Our work is not a critique. It is a declaration: that making, thinking, and designing without permission, “from the outside” and in between, not strictly within these circles of theory and praxis, is more vital than ever.
That theory, to matter, must be made in the act of creation.
We are not interested in commentary. We are interested in construction.