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What Is JōKAI THEORY? An Unfinished Treatise or Novel on the Collapse of the World | Theory-Fiction, Generative AI, and “Collapse through Excess” Explained

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JōKAI THEORY (Jōkai riron) is a long text by MMM_Memento Mori Machina. Its full title is JōKAI THEORY: An Unfinished Treatise, or Novel, on the Melting of the Slash through Excess (Jōkai riron: Kajō ni yoru shasen yūkai ni kansuru mikansei no ronbun arui wa shōsetsu). Across thirteen chapters in four parts, it examines a single question—“how do things break down because there is too much of them?”—through literature, society, institutions, philosophy, and generative AI. The concept at its center, jōkai (roughly, “collapse through excess”), refers to a phenomenon in which an increase not only in information or knowledge but in elements, relations, rules, judgments, and the like crosses a critical threshold, so that mutual interference and processing load impair the functioning of the whole［1］.

The full text of JōKAI THEORY is available on the official MMM website, both in the English edition and in the original Japanese. The work is released under CC BY-SA 4.0, which permits copying, redistribution, and adaptation subject to conditions such as attribution and share-alike. Third-party quotations and similar material contained in the original are excluded from that license［2］.

Describing JōKAI THEORY simply as a work of thought or criticism, however, is not enough. Alongside theoretical definitions and models, literary criticism, philosophical reflection, and social analysis, the text contains 100 annotations, passages close to first-person reminiscence or confession, references to conversations with AI, and even accounts of how the manuscript was generated and revised. At the end of the book there is also a chronology, a list of sources, and a bibliography［1］.

The style also shifts sharply. The sections that use symbols such as A, A*, Cgen, and Cver and pile up definitions and conditions are written in mechanical, impersonal prose reminiscent of academic papers or technical documents. In some of the annotations, by contrast—especially the group marked [B4]—memory, hesitation, conversation, the body, everyday life, and failures in writing come in, and the prose turns human and organic. Dry theory and living narration intersect within the same text, and neither alone can account for the work as a whole［1］.

As if announcing this doubleness, the text opens with a short sentence:

A theory is at once diagnosis and symptom［3］.

JōKAI THEORY diagnoses the collapse of the world. As one reads on, however, it becomes clear that the text writing the diagnosis is not free of the problems it describes either.

Contents

  1. What Kind of Text Is JōKAI THEORY?
  2. What Is Jōkai? Things Do Not Break Down Only Because There Is “Too Little”
  3. Not Shutdown but Hyperfunction: Becoming Foolish by Becoming Too Smart
  4. Literature Had Already Depicted “Collapse through Excess”
  5. Karamazov Hang: Not No Answer, but Too Many Answers
  6. The Slash: Society Runs on Making Distinctions
  7. Operational Bankruptcy: The Institutions Remain, but Stop Working
  8. Slash Melting: Boundaries Do Not Vanish—They Multiply Too Much
  9. Ontological Collapse: What Does It Mean to Live in the Same World?
  10. Generative AI: The Comprehensive Accelerator of Jōkai
  11. The Machine Oracle: If Machines Judge Correctly, Do Humans No Longer Need to Judge?
  12. Why Is This a “Novel”?
  13. “A Theory Is at Once Diagnosis and Symptom”
  14. AI Enters a Text That Writes about AI
  15. Partway Through, “What You Are Reading” Changes
  16. Conclusion: What Was JōKAI THEORY?

What Kind of Text Is JōKAI THEORY?

If existing literary terms are used as guidelines, this article first reads JōKAI THEORY as theory-fiction. In a 2024 monograph, Simon O’Sullivan treats theory-fiction, alongside autofiction/autotheory and art writing, as one of several “hybrid genres,” examining it as a writing practice distinct from conventional academic papers and essays［4］.

In JōKAI THEORY, theory is not a body of ideas placed in the background of a novel. The formation of theory is what drives the text. Concepts are created, applied to literary works, used to analyze social institutions, connected to arguments about generative AI, and finally even the act of writing the theory is absorbed into the work. In this sense, its character is easier to grasp if it is considered not as “a novel about ideas” but as a text that turns even the act of making theory into literature.

At the same time, the work is strongly metafictional. Metafiction has been discussed as a form in which fiction draws attention to its own making and to the problem of how fiction is formed［5］. In JōKAI THEORY, the form of the academic paper, the relation between main text and annotations, writing, the use of AI, revision, and completion versus incompletion are treated not as circumstances outside the work but as problems within the text.

Furthermore, where first-person experience and theoretical reflection intersect, the work touches on autotheory. Emanuela Herceg describes autotheory as a writing practice that integrates autobiographical elements and reminiscence with critical theory, examining personal and bodily experience philosophically［6］. Similar structures can be seen in JōKAI THEORY, but the official web edition contains no material establishing that the “I” in the work and the actual author, MMM, are the same person. This article therefore uses the terms “autotheoretical” and, for passages where self-description and fiction waver, “autofictional.”

Another useful term for describing the work is fictocriticism. Gerrit Haas discusses fictocriticism as a writing practice in which fiction and criticism are not separated but intersect［7］. In JōKAI THEORY, theory is built out of writing that criticizes literary works; descriptions of the narrator writing that theory then appear; and the narrator’s actions in turn become objects of theoretical analysis. Because criticism and creative writing do not stay in separate domains, fictocriticism is a useful point of comparison.

More broadly, the work also has aspects that could be called a novel of ideas or a philosophical novel. The passages dealing with generative AI, machine judgment, the machine oracle, and future communities include thought experiments that approach speculative fiction and science fiction. However, the work as a whole is not science fiction set in a future society, and the term “speculative fiction” itself has several historical usages, so this article treats these as secondary classifications［8］.

None of these is an official genre designation by JōKAI THEORY. One intriguing concept the work itself proposes is the “nue-text,” or Nuetexis.

Nuetexis: A compound of nue (a monster stitched together from parts of different species) and the Greek τῆξις (melting). It refers to a text in which multiple lineages of content and form are mixed and which fits awkwardly within any existing classification［9］.

JōKAI THEORY does not officially classify itself as Nuetexis. Still, the concept can serve as a guideline for reading a form that stitches together the academic paper, criticism, philosophy, thought, the novel, and self-description. The impossibility of giving the work’s form a single name from the outset also resonates with the problem of the “slash,” discussed below.

What Is Jōkai? Things Do Not Break Down Only Because There Is “Too Little”

The starting point of JōKAI THEORY is relatively clear. Things do not necessarily break down only because of a shortage. In general, more knowledge is better. More information is better. More precise rules are better. Thorough discussion is better. But beyond a certain point, an increase can start to have the opposite effect. The work defines jōkai as follows:

Jōkai is a phenomenon in which an increase in aggregate A involved in the operation of a system exceeds critical threshold A*, and through interference, competition, and overcrowding among elements and an increase in processing load, the system as a whole undergoes a phase transition from maintenance of function to dysfunction, giving rise to chaos, breakdown, and collapse［10］.

A “system” here can be thought of as any unit that operates with some function. Let A be the aggregate of elements involved in that system. Within a certain range, an increase in A strengthens the system’s function. But once it exceeds the critical threshold A*, the load required to coordinate and process the elements grows large and begins, conversely, to impair the function of the whole.

Importantly, A does not simply mean a count. Excess includes not only an increase in the number of elements but also relational density, constraint, intensity of action, and so on. Even a single rule can produce dysfunction if it is applied too forcefully. Conversely, a large number of elements will not necessarily lead to the same result if the processing load is sufficiently low. Jōkai is therefore not just another name for “information overload.” At its center is a model in which an increase in the elements that supported a system flips, beyond a certain point, into something that obstructs the system’s function［10］.

Not Shutdown but Hyperfunction: Becoming Foolish by Becoming Too Smart

In Chapter 2, the model of jōkai is applied to intellectual activity, and the concept of benighted erudition (tachi mōmai) appears. This is a state in which one cannot judge not because one does not know, but because knowledge and processing have increased too much.

You investigate a problem and read source X. You then find counterargument Y, and checking Y makes it necessary to look into premise Z. Z, in turn, has several competing interpretations, and tracing the sources of each turns up corrections and refutations. The further the investigation goes, the deeper the understanding becomes—but the number of things that must be checked grows as well. The work accordingly discusses states of proliferating understandings, proliferating verifications, proliferating deliberations, proliferating conclusions, proliferating judgments, and proliferating actions.

It is not that there is no understanding; several understandings stand side by side. Nor is it that no verification takes place; verification generates new objects to verify. Discussion is not lacking; discussion multiplies the points at issue. It is not that no conclusion exists; multiple conclusions, each derived from its own premises, coexist. The work sums up this state as follows:

The dysfunction of intellectual activity in benighted erudition is not shutdown but hyperfunction［11］.

This “hyperfunction” points to the basic paradox running through JōKAI THEORY. If the word “collapse” makes you imagine a stoppage, the text becomes hard to understand. In a system undergoing jōkai, processing may continue. People investigate, write, discuss, correct, and adjudicate. And yet the very function that is supposed to be achieved is the only thing that steadily erodes. Jōkai is not a state in which nothing happens anymore, but a state in which, although activity continues, the whole can no longer converge.

Literature Had Already Depicted “Collapse through Excess”

In Part II, literary works are read using the model of jōkai. What matters here is that the works do not each illustrate one and the same kind of “information overload.” Different kinds of excess are drawn from different domains: language, rules, voices, connections, recursion, and gigantic form.

Chapter 3, on Babel, deals with an excess of language. As vocabularies, definitions, technical terms, and conceptual systems grow, the world ought to become describable with greater precision. But when each community develops its own system of words, when the same word carries different meanings and the same object is given multiple names, communication comes to require translation and the confirmation of premises. Words are not lost; rather, the proliferation of words causes the shared code to be lost. The work calls this “Logoschizis”［24］.

In Chapter 4, on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, the problem is an excess of rules. There are cases in which rules proliferate until they no longer fit together, and cases in which the constraint of rules is so strong that it blocks action in reality. The work groups both under “Nomoschizis,” with Nomotarachē (rule confusion) and Nomoplegia (rule paralysis) as its subtypes. Here it is also shown that jōkai cannot be explained by quantity alone: even a single rule can impair function if its constraint is excessively strong［25］.

Chapter 5, on The Brothers Karamazov, deals with an excess of voices and of authorities. Different voices coexist, each without losing its own logic and persuasiveness. Polyphony can be a source of richness in literature, but a different problem arises when a community needs to reach a single judgment. The individual voices do not break down; what fails is the shared standard for adjudicating among them. The work calls this state “Polyphonic Schizis” and colloquially calls it “Karamazov hang”［12］.

Chapter 6, on Gravity’s Rainbow, discusses an excess of connections. Understanding the novel requires tracing relations among characters, history, science, politics, symbols, and more. But if the network of connections keeps expanding, the map made in order to understand becomes a labyrinth. The work calls the state in which the cost of grasping the network rises and readers and makers become trapped in it “Paranexia”［26］.

In Chapter 7, on Infinite Jest, the problem is the opposite of outward-spreading connection: recursion circulating inward. You think about yourself, then inspect the self that is thinking, then inspect that inspection. Self-reflection is necessary for intelligence, but once recursion becomes a closed circuit, thought, action, and desire keep circling the same spot. The work calls this state “Anakleisis”［27］.

Chapter 8, on the mega-novel, focuses on inclusion and hypertrophy. The work describes literature that grows enormous by absorbing many different domains as “Pantrophia.” Yet it does not treat hypertrophy as a simple defect. The attitude of deliberately embracing gigantism as an aesthetic, rather than avoiding it, is distinguished as a separate concept, Pantrophism. In literature, what would ordinarily be called dysfunction can also become a formal achievement. This point keeps jōkai from being read as a negative verdict on every kind of excess［28］.

In this way, Part II uses literature not as a set of worked examples illustrating the theory but as a site for discovering different types of jōkai. Reading literary works and building the theory are not separated here.

Karamazov Hang: Not No Answer, but Too Many Answers

Among the literary cases in Part II, “Karamazov hang” is the concept that makes the thinking behind JōKAI THEORY easiest to grasp intuitively. The original defines it as follows:

Karamazov hang: A state in which multiple voices continue to operate while retaining their respective meaning and persuasive force, while the common criterion for adjudication is lost and only the conclusion fails to return［12］.

“Hang” comes from the state in which a computer becomes unresponsive while still processing. The key point is that the individual voices are not broken. Each claim has meaning and its own internal logic. What has failed is the shared adjudicating function that integrates them and settles “what has been decided.”

Here JōKAI THEORY addresses a problem different from simple relativism. It is not saying that “nothing is right.” Rather, because multiple systems can each claim to be right, and each is persuasive, they cannot converge on a single conclusion. It is not that no answer exists. There are too many answers, so the community cannot return a single one. This structure carries over into the social theory of Chapter 9 onward.

The Slash: Society Runs on Making Distinctions

Chapter 9 rethinks the jōkai observed in literature as a problem of how communities operate. At its center is the concept of the “slash.” True/false, right/wrong, legal/illegal, human/machine, reality/fiction: society organizes the world using distinctions like these. But the mere existence of the words “true/false” does not determine whether a given piece of information is true or false. That requires investigating, tracing sources, checking counterevidence, and correcting errors. In law it requires hearings and interpretation; in scholarship, peer review and replication.

JōKAI THEORY calls “the sum total of effort, attention, and human and technical resources” that a community pays to maintain its distinctions the “slash-maintenance cost”［13］. The idea that follows is simple but important: boundaries cost something to maintain. The lines between true and false, legal and illegal, human and machine do not last forever once drawn. They are kept effective as communal distinctions only through repeated adjudication, verification, correction, and enforcement.

The work calls the totality of this capacity “communal intelligence.” This is not the sum of individual intelligence, but the capacity of a community to sort out the world through verification, response, correction, consensus-building, and the like［29］.

Operational Bankruptcy: The Institutions Remain, but Stop Working

When the distinctions that must be maintained increase and their cost exceeds the community’s processing capacity, what the work calls “operational bankruptcy” occurs.

Operational bankruptcy is not a state in which the ideals or definitions of slashes have disappeared. Distinctions such as true/false, right/wrong, human/machine, and legal/illegal remain nominally. But the practical work of actually determining, verifying, enforcing, correcting, and sharing them no longer runs［14］.

Here too, collapse is not disappearance. The laws and institutions are still there. Meetings are held. Audits are carried out. Reports are produced. But when the objects to be processed and the procedures multiply too much, a large gap opens between a form existing and its actually functioning.

One route to operational bankruptcy that the work presents is “verification bankruptcy.” Denoting the cost of generation as Cgen and the cost of verification as Cver, it considers the asymmetry Cgen < Cver: making something is cheaper than confirming that it is correct. The work does not, however, claim that this inequality alone produces verification bankruptcy. What matters is that a growing volume of generation combines with the asymmetry in verification cost, so that the total verification cost required exceeds the resources that can be committed［30］.

Besides verification bankruptcy, the work presents another route to operational bankruptcy, “institutional bankruptcy,” in which the cost of maintaining institutions exceeds the upper limit of what can be committed. Rules, audits, compliance, reporting, and the like are necessary to maintain institutions, but running them costs something too［33］. An institution undergoing jōkai does not necessarily stop. It can keep operating while its function is impaired.

Slash Melting: Boundaries Do Not Vanish—They Multiply Too Much

An important concept placed beyond operational bankruptcy is “slash melting.” The word “melting” may suggest a state in which boundaries disappear and everything becomes the same. The work’s definition, however, is different.

Slash melting is neither the intellectual denial of boundaries and distinctions nor a declaration that “everything is relative.” It is the condition in which, as a result of the community losing its operational capacity for slash maintenance, the slash no longer functions sufficiently as a slash［15］.

When distinctions stop working well, people do not necessarily stop drawing lines. On the contrary, each redraws the lines, amends them, sets exceptions, and creates other criteria for judgment. The work depicts a state in which the slash is no longer shared as a single effective line and instead proliferates into many competing lines. The multiplied lines compete with one another, waver, overlap, and make communal convergence difficult［31］.

Here lies an important reversal in the theory of jōkai. Truth does not disappear; candidates for truth multiply. Rightness does not disappear; different kinds of rightness multiply. Rules do not vanish; rules and exceptions multiply. The problem is not an absence of boundaries but an excess of boundaries.

The “collapse of the world” in this article’s title is best understood in this sense as well. The collapse depicted in JōKAI THEORY is not an apocalypse in which the world physically ceases to exist. It means that the distinctions that articulate the world and make it shareable no longer work adequately within the community.

Ontological Collapse: What Does It Mean to Live in the Same World?

In Chapter 10, the failure to maintain the slash is discussed as a problem that goes beyond the running of institutions and bears on whether a shared world can exist at all. Money, ownership, qualifications, contracts, crimes, news, scholarly theories, personal identity: part of the world we experience is supported by communal recognition and distinction. The mere existence of a physical object does not settle “whose it is,” “whether it is genuine,” “whether it is legal,” or “whether it is fact.” Articulation by institutions and communities is required.

If that capacity for articulation fails, then even if the world does not physically disappear, it becomes difficult to establish together “what kind of world this is, and what is happening in it.” The work calls this phase “ontological collapse.”

The community still tries to explain, judge, and share the world. But because the slashes for doing so do not converge, the world becomes difficult to constitute as a stable order. This paper calls this juncture—at which dysfunction in slash maintenance reaches even the way the world is—ontological collapse［16］.

People watching the same footage cannot agree on what it shows. People looking at the same figures do not share an understanding of who measured them, what they mean, or by what standard they should be evaluated. Section 10.3 of Chapter 10 discusses a state in which the world is divided locally while being excessively connected globally—that is, a situation in which fragmentation and crossed wires advance at the same time［32］.

At this point, jōkai is no longer about the quantity of information. The question being asked is how a community comes to share a single world in the first place.

Generative AI: The Comprehensive Accelerator of Jōkai

Chapter 11 centers on generative AI. Generative AI can produce text, images, translations, summaries, explanations, rebuttals, programs, and more in large quantities at low cost. From the standpoint of the theory developed so far, it is easy to see why generative AI matters: it rapidly increases aggregate A and drastically lowers the cost of generation.

JōKAI THEORY is not, however, a simple anti-AI argument.

Generative AI actually enhances communal intelligence［17］.

In searching, organizing, translating, drafting, verifying, and so on, AI can extend human processing capacity. What the work takes issue with is not that AI is useless, but a different kind of load that arises when a useful technology spreads rapidly and increases both generative capacity and the volume of use.

The work positions generative AI as follows:

Generative AI is not a single case history of Jōkai. It increases A(t), pushes Cgen < Cver to an extreme, expands slash-maintenance cost, and advances operational bankruptcy and ontological collapse simultaneously［18］.

The phrase “comprehensive accelerator” does not mean that AI alone causes jōkai. It is used in the sense that AI acts simultaneously on multiple problems that already existed—language, sources, authorship, responsibility, truth and falsehood, human/machine, and so on. And here the theory turns over once again. If the volume of generation exceeds human capacity for verification, why not use AI for verification as well?

The Machine Oracle: If Machines Judge Correctly, Do Humans No Longer Need to Judge?

If AI is used for verification and classification, machines might uphold slashes that humans alone can no longer maintain. The work, however, does not regard this as a simple solution.

The slash is maintained, but humans can no longer determine why that slash was drawn. In place of slash melting, a different pathology—the opacity of the slash—may arise［19］.

A verdict comes back. But humans cannot adequately trace its grounds. Even if the distinction itself is maintained, a state may arise in which humans cannot judge why that distinction is correct.

This is where the “Oracle Shift” appears, in the annotations to Chapter 11. Within the work, it is explained as the possibility that the subject of judgment shifts gradually from humans to machines, and that the relationship changes from one in which humans use machines as tools to one in which humans follow machines’ judgments. The work also presents three stages: “the Anthropocratic Phase,” in which the human community maintains slashes through verification, deliberation, and consensus; “the Cyborg Phase,” in which humans and machines divide the work of slash maintenance; and “the Oracular Phase,” in which the subject of judgment effectively shifts to the machine［20］. These do not demonstrate that actual history will necessarily proceed in that order; they need to be read as a thought model within the work.

Here the question is no longer only whether AI is more accurate than humans. Once machines can judge with high accuracy, why should humans have to judge for themselves? Judgment comes with responsibility and anxiety. If you decide for yourself, you must also accept the possibility of having been wrong. It is possible, then, that humans will hand judgment over to machines of their own accord—before the capacity is taken from them—to escape the burden of judging. The work’s account of the Oracle Shift is not only about one-sided domination by machines. It also includes the possibility that humans will seek an authority that judges for them.

Why Is This a “Novel”?

On the basis of what has been described so far alone, JōKAI THEORY would stand as a text of ideas that introduces many original concepts. Yet its full title says “treatise, or novel.” A key to understanding why is the way its 100 annotations are used. In an ordinary academic paper, the main text carries the principal argument, and the notes provide sources and supplements. JōKAI THEORY, however, makes even this hierarchy a problem.

Annotations are, in principle, for explaining, elucidating, and supplementing the main text, but excessive annotations push the main text into the background. Far from helping the reader’s understanding, they obstruct it. When the volume of annotations exceeds the volume of the main text, the relation between the main text and annotations reverses［21］.

And further:

Annotations are hostile to the main text［22］.

A theory about annotations is set out within the annotations, and those annotations cast doubt on the authority of the main text. Here the form of the work and the problems it discusses come together. In the main text, concepts are defined, classified, and systematized. The prose is impersonal and tries to stabilize the theory. Some of the annotations, however, let in things that do not fit easily into an orderly system: doubts, objections, memories, conversations, failures, the use of AI, revisions. While the mechanical theoretical prose tries to classify the world, the human narration brings in experiences that slip through those classifications.

The tension between these two styles is not merely a stylistic variation. Theory and experience, classification and the body, consistency and the uncertainty of memory are juxtaposed as the very form of the text.

“A Theory Is at Once Diagnosis and Symptom”

This brings us back to the opening sentence. JōKAI THEORY discusses the proliferation of language while coining a great many new words. It discusses excessive annotation while carrying 100 annotations. It analyzes polyphony while generating, between main text and annotations, multiple narrative strands that are hard to reduce to a single voice. It deals with mass generation and verification by generative AI, and in its latter half there even appear accounts of writing with AI and of multiple versions of the manuscript.

Given these structures, JōKAI THEORY can be read as a self-enactment of the theory of jōkai. This, however, is not a fact stated as such in the text of the work; it is a critical interpretation based on self-referential structures that can be confirmed in the text. It can be confirmed that the work itself states that “a theory is at once diagnosis and symptom” and that it deals with the hostility between annotations and main text and with the problem of multiple drafts, but it cannot be asserted that every contradiction or inconsistency in the work was intentionally designed［3］.

This distinction also matters for the work as literature. If the theory lost its function completely and could convey nothing, it could be read simply as a text whose argument has failed. Conversely, if everything were defined univocally, the annotations wholly supported the main text, and the whole closed as a single system to the end, it would be a theoretical treatise analyzing jōkai from a safe position. JōKAI THEORY fits fully into neither. While building its theory, it also takes into its own interior the problems that theory describes. That is where the two roles of “diagnosis” and “symptom” overlap.

AI Enters a Text That Writes about AI

This structure becomes clearest in the accounts of the writing process that appear in the latter half. In the annotations to Chapter 11 there is a scene in which multiple versions of the manuscript are examined, and the text describes a draft generated by AI, a draft in which the narrator rewrote the whole text, a draft that was again rewritten by AI, a draft in which the treatise was scrapped and a novel begun, a draft that returned once more to the treatise, and so on［23］.

An ATTESTED distinction is needed here. It can be confirmed that this account exists in the official web edition. That does not, however, mean that the existence or order of an actual production log or of each version has been externally proven. The production record within the work cannot be treated as is as biographical material about the actual author.

Viewed as part of the work’s form, on the other hand, this account is important. The theory states that generative AI widens the asymmetry between the costs of generation and verification. AI generation also appears in the text writing that theory, and past drafts are examined to determine who wrote which passage. The acts of generating, revising, and checking produce new objects to check, and the problem the theory was analyzing folds back onto the act of writing.

This also leaves room to read the work as “anti-AI AI literature.” Since the work itself acknowledges that generative AI may strengthen communal intelligence, however, it cannot be called simply anti-AI literature. The twist of using AI while dealing with the problems of generation, verification, authorship, responsibility, and the agent of judgment that AI amplifies needs to be examined as a separate issue.

Partway Through, “What You Are Reading” Changes

Explaining the specific developments in the final part of JōKAI THEORY could spoil the pleasure of actually reading the work. There is, however, one feature that is worth knowing even before reading it.

In this text, the object the reader is observing gradually shifts. At first you read a theory called jōkai. Next you read literary criticism that uses that theory. Then communities, institutions, the shared world, and generative AI become objects of analysis. And in the latter half, the prose writing the theory, the annotations, the narrator, the revisions, and the act of production itself are added to what is being read. What began as reading a theory about the world eventually becomes reading the very process by which the theory is being made.

This is where the meaning of the title “an unfinished treatise, or novel” comes into view. Two kinds of writing, “a treatise and a novel,” are not simply placed side by side. The movement that builds theory as a treatise and the movement that produces narrative as a novel interfere with each other within the same text, and the boundary that would decide which category it belongs to does not hold steady either.

Conclusion: What Was JōKAI THEORY?

JōKAI THEORY begins from a relatively simple model: things break down by increasing too much. Knowledge, words, rules, voices, connections, recursion—things that ordinarily enhance the abilities of people and communities—increase, and once they pass a certain threshold, the cost of organizing and coordinating them squeezes function. The collapse that occurs here is not a simple stoppage. It is “hyperfunction,” in which activity increases while only the overall purpose can no longer be achieved.

The model of jōkai drawn from literature eventually connects to the problem of society’s capacity to judge truth and falsehood, right and wrong. A community articulates the world through various distinctions, but those distinctions cost something to maintain. When line-drawing proliferates beyond the capacity to maintain it, boundaries do not vanish; rather, different boundaries compete and struggle to function as shared lines. At the core of slash melting is not “a world without boundaries” but “a world with too many boundaries.”

When that failure further reaches the very existence of a shared world, what the work calls ontological collapse occurs. Generative AI increases generative capacity while also acting on multiple problems: verification, authorship, responsibility, truth and falsehood, human/machine. And if AI takes over verification and judgment as well, the question shifts from “Are the machines right?” to “Who is the agent of judgment?”

What distinguishes JōKAI THEORY, however, does not lie only in the content of its theory. Criticism, the academic paper, philosophy, thought, the novel, and self-description are mixed in a single text, and impersonal, mechanical theoretical prose intersects with human, organic narration. It can be read through multiple forms—theory-fiction, metafiction, autotheory, fictocriticism, and others—yet no single classification covers the whole.

And the prose describing that theory cannot keep standing outside the problems the theory deals with. The annotations doubt the main text, accounts of production enter the theory, and writing with AI overlaps with the argument about AI. JōKAI THEORY is a text that explains jōkai, and at the same time a text that lets us read the process by which the boundary between theory and literature becomes unstable.

“A theory is at once diagnosis and symptom.” If one were to describe JōKAI THEORY, this “unfinished treatise, or novel,” in brief, it is this sentence that ties together both its content and its form.

About the Research for This Article

This article was written using as its reference text the MMM_Memento Mori Machina official web edition of JōKAI THEORY: An Unfinished Treatise, or Novel, on the Melting of the Slash through Excess, version 1.0-Final (draft-A-v6.2), last_updated 2026-08-08. The work’s chapter structure, main concepts, annotations, and direct quotations were checked against the official web edition, and descriptions within the work were distinguished from this article’s summaries and interpretations.

Labels such as theory-fiction, metafiction, autotheory, autofiction, fictocriticism, and speculative fiction are not official genre designations by JōKAI THEORY. They are this article’s critical classifications, based on comparing existing concepts in literary studies with the structure of the work. In addition, with regard to first-person passages in the work, the use of AI, revisions, characters’ statements, and the like, this article distinguishes between their being described in the official web edition and their being externally confirmed as the actual biography or production history of the real author.

Notes

Most sources below are in Japanese. Original titles are given with English translations in brackets.

  1. MMM_Memento Mori Machina, 『剰壊理論：過剰による斜線融解に関する未完成の論文あるいは小説』 [JōKAI THEORY: An Unfinished Treatise, or Novel, on the Melting of the Slash through Excess], official web edition, version 1.0-Final (draft-A-v6.2), last_updated 2026-08-08. Consulted for basic information including the full title, overall structure, annotations, and appendices.
  2. Ibid., 「ライセンス」 [License]. The work is marked CC BY-SA 4.0. Third-party quotations and similar material contained in the original are excluded from that license. License text: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
  3. Ibid., front matter: 「理論は診断であると同時に症状である」 [A theory is at once diagnosis and symptom]
  4. Simon O’Sullivan, On Theory-Fiction and Other Genres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. Examines theory-fiction, autofiction/autotheory, and art writing as “genres (or ‘hybrid genres’).”
  5. Jerome Klinkowitz, “Metafiction,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, published 26 July 2017. Describes metafiction as a form of prose that draws attention to the process of fiction-making.
  6. Emanuela Herceg, “Introducing the Concept of Autotheory in Literary Practices,” Anafora, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2024), pp. 355–365, published online 25 March 2025. Article in Croatian, original title “Uvod u pojam autoteorije u književnim praksama,” with an English abstract.
  7. Gerrit Haas, Fictocritical Strategies: Subverting Textual Practices of Meaning, Other, and Self-Formation, transcript Verlag, 2017. ISBN 978-3-8376-3704-5 (print) / 978-3-8394-3704-9 (e-book).
  8. Marek Oziewicz, “Speculative Fiction,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, published 29 March 2017. Surveys several historically distinct usages of “speculative fiction.”
  9. 『剰壊理論』 [JōKAI THEORY], Chapter 0, Annotation 03: 「鵺書、ヌエテクシス（Nuetexis）」 [Nue-text, Nuetexis]
  10. Ibid., Chapter 1, 1.2 「Model」. The general model of jōkai; A, A*.
  11. Ibid., Chapter 2, 2.4 「機能停止ではなく過剰作動」 [Not Shutdown but Hyperfunction]
  12. Ibid., Chapter 5, Annotation 01: 「カラマーゾフ・ハング」 [Karamazov Hang]
  13. Ibid., Chapter 9, 9.1 「斜線維持費と臨界値A*」 [Slash-Maintenance Cost and Critical Threshold A*]
  14. Ibid., Chapter 9, 9.2 「運用破産」 [Operational Bankruptcy]
  15. Ibid., Chapter 9, 9.6 「相転移と斜線融解」 [Phase Transition and Slash Melting]
  16. Ibid., Chapter 10, 10.2 「運用破産から存在論的崩壊へ」 [From Operational Bankruptcy to Ontological Collapse]
  17. Ibid., Chapter 11, 11.7 「共同体知性の強化と失調」 [Enhancement and Dysfunction of Communal Intelligence]
  18. Ibid., Chapter 11, 11.8 「なぜ生成AIは総合的加速装置なのか」 [Why Generative AI Is the Comprehensive Accelerator]
  19. Ibid., Chapter 11, Annotation 02: 「斜線の不透明化」 [The Opacity of the Slash]
  20. Ibid., Chapter 11, Annotation 06: 「オラクルシフト（Oracle Shift）」 [Oracle Shift], and Annotation 07. The gradual shift of the subject of judgment, including the Anthropocratic Phase, the Cyborg Phase, and the Oracular Phase.
  21. Ibid., Chapter 1, Annotation 04
  22. Ibid., Chapter 1, Annotation 06
  23. Ibid., Chapter 11, Annotation 16. The in-work account of AI generation, a full rewrite by the narrator, regeneration by AI, conversion into a novel, and a return to the treatise. Not treated as material that independently proves the actual production history.
  24. Ibid., Chapter 3: 「バベルの塔：言語過剰による言語分裂症（Logoschizis）」 [The Tower of Babel: Logoschizis through Excess of Language]
  25. Ibid., Chapter 4: 「不思議の国と鏡の国：規則過剰による規則分裂症（Nomoschizis）」 [Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World: Nomoschizis through Excess of Rules]
  26. Ibid., Chapter 6: 「重力の虹：接続過剰による絡網症（Paranexia）」 [Gravity’s Rainbow: Paranexia through Excess of Connections]
  27. Ibid., Chapter 7: 「Infinite Jest：再帰過剰による循環閉塞症（Anakleisis）」 [Infinite Jest: Anakleisis through Excess of Recursion]
  28. Ibid., Chapter 8, 8.2–8.4. Pantrophia and Pantrophism.
  29. Ibid., Chapter 9, 9.2. Definition of communal intelligence.
  30. Ibid., Chapter 9, 9.3 「検証破産──Cgen < Cver」 [Verification Bankruptcy — Cgen < Cver]. The inequality alone is not treated as a sufficient condition for verification bankruptcy.
  31. Ibid., Chapter 9, 9.7 「運用破産と斜線融解の社会的症状」 [Social Symptoms of Operational Bankruptcy and Slash Melting]. Competition, wavering, and multiplication of slashes; tangled lines; crossed wires.
  32. Ibid., Chapter 10, 10.3 「共有世界の分裂と混線」 [Division and Crosstalk in the Shared World]. Discusses a state in which the world is divided locally while being excessively connected globally.
  33. Ibid., Chapter 9, 9.4 「制度破産──Cinst > Cinstmax」 [Institutional Bankruptcy — Cinst > Cinstmax] and 9.5 「名目上の斜線と実質上の斜線」 [Nominal Slash and Effective Slash]

References and Principal Sources

Text of the Work and License

Genre and Literary Theory

Translated from the Japanese original, “『剰壊理論』とは？｜世界の崩壊を描く未完成の論文あるいは小説”. Quotations from Japanese sources are our own translations.

*This is an ATTESTED article. Factual statements are based on existing, verifiable sources; where it includes third-party views or the author’s inferences, interpretations, or evaluations, these are presented so as not to be confused with confirmed facts. It contains no deliberate fiction or fabrication presented as real-world fact.

Presented by MMM (publisher of JōKAI THEORY)

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