This is the sentence that opens the book. It was supposed to be something special, but sometimes you just need to get straight into things. What things? Well, first of all, let’s clear up any confusion: “Underground Theory” is the name of this book, but “Theory Underground” is the name of a critical media theory experiment that is a sort of one-person college, social media app, and publishing house. It’s my baby. I consider it an opportunity to hone my own abilities, experiment with new media forms, and collaborate with friends and fellow travelers in the world of underground theory.
The goal of Theory Underground is to develop educational content for, and connect with, people who see no future in what is on offer today, but who nonetheless want to raise the bar that has been lowered by academic institutions who serve profit and the pursuit of career advancement as their ultimate end. Movements from the history of underground music emerge from rich contexts of artists experimenting with new media forms in an attempt to better express their moment. They break away from the suffocating and stultifying mainstream to do what they love regardless of the cost.
Underground theorists do similarly, in experimenting with new media forms and modes of organizing so as to revolutionize understanding in the fields of knowledge. This can be good and bad, because a lot of self-styled gurus and charlatans necessarily emerge from the influencersphere. In leaving academia they end up abandoning standards and legitimacy altogether. One can leave academia to try to save oneself but nonetheless sellout to the attention economy’s algorithms. Giving in to market pressures results in a loss of purpose and integrity. One of the goals of Theory Underground is to counter the worst tendencies of the attention economy. Theory Underground aims to raise the standards on ourselves, so that we can rise to genuine challenges that were only feigned at our overly administered universities.
What lies beneath the ground?
The word “underground” has many connotations: Adventure, danger, marginalization, and creation. Though it has always been the case that those who are burnt out with, or see no future in, “the above ground” flock to the underground as an exciting and edgy reprieve from the repressive expectations, obligations, and law of society, the underground is not something to glorify uncritically. Its negative connotations include abandonment, exile, crime, addiction, and violence.
Light and darkness are interdependent, but civilization has lifted light to the level of True and Good, repressing everything associated with darkness to the level of evil. The Nietzschean, Bataillean, Landian, punk, hardcore, and rap tendencies are to take “tarrying with the negative” to its hyperbolic limit. GG Allin is the archetype of this limit: the punk “rock star” known for beating the shit out of fans, raping audience members on stage, and throwing his excrement everywhere.
Everywhere an underground scene opens up, the social superego will infiltrate, a new order will get erected, and then from those conditions will arise the likes of a Nick Land or GG Allin who take transgression to a point that breaks the pretense and exposes the “posers” for what they are: tourists and lifestyle consumers.
For those unfamiliar with Nick Land’s notorious transgressive style, this is the kind of thing he was writing in his ostensibly leftist days:
Christ screams on the cross: ‘Father, your parsimony disgusts me, is this a death?’ He thinks of the abortion he missed, lying wrapped in bloody rags on the floor of a cheap hostelry. He is excited by the thought of his mother in mortal sin, and of a harsher love than he ever knew. How was it possible for her to forgo the delight of hacking God’s fruit from her womb? (That was a chance for religion.) ‘for, behold, the days are coming in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck’ [John XXIII:29].[i]
Pretty edgy, yeah? This is why I see Land as the GG Allin of theory.
Proximity to filth, crust, disease, and cruelty thus gets raised to the level of social and cultural capital: upward mobility in transgressive counterculture circles can thus commodify the signifiers of self harm, ritual abuse, and gore for its own sake. If one’s “transgression” is really just wrapped up in the jouissance of shocking the sensibilities of polite society, then its thirst for annihilation will go far beyond blasphemy in more traditional senses, which is why Land moved on to greener pastures of shock, coining the term “neo reactionary dark enlightenment” and dabbling in “race realism.”
Edginess feels real when nothing else does. The domesticated suburbanite animal of middle class America, caged by a schooling system that reduces its vital timenergy to instrumentalized labor power, which qualifies that labor power on the basis of how well the subject succeeds or fails in having its libidinal economy incorporated into the structure of rewards and punishments, screams out for something, anything, Real.
Real is that which cannot be incorporated into the sanitized, structured, ordered and beautiful world of appearances, perceptions, and commodity relations. The Real is the realm of trauma—as GG Allin says, “I am the real!”
Rape, genocide, serial killers, and addiction thus get raised to the level of idols by countercultural consumer fandoms. Those disenchanted with their privilege and the fakeness of the world watch American Psycho, Clockwork Orange, and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom on repeat. Is this “real shit”?
How about videos of Mexican cartels peeling the faces off of its torture victims? What about ISIS beheadings? Don’t forget Faces of Death. Underground shit always has these niche corners of fascination with the worst aspects of human nature. Everything we are not allowed to talk about wants to come out to play. The underground is opened by those who feel a roiling madness at the hypocrisy of the hyper-sanitized and over-produced corporate middle class illusion. Whatever spits in the face of all that and says, “You’re actually no better than the filth you repress by force” has potential to get lifted to the level of an underground idol.
It is not rare to find suicide getting glorified too in the underground. Is it because so many involved have already gone through a sort of symbolic suicide that got them shut out of the mainstream in the first place? Is it because of what Sean Mittelstaedt calls “future trauma” (in this volume)?
It’s also because suicide is the place where absolute self-possession, freedom, and transgression of morality and law all meet in a singular act that cannot be exchanged. This is why Baudrillard thought seriously about its radical potential to counter capital.
GG Allin promised to kill himself on stage as the grand culmination of his project, which would have been the most extreme manifestation of his autonomy, but instead, he died from overdose, a slave to his appetites.
The $UICIDEBOY$ made a suicide pact that, if they did not “make it” in the hardcore-rap underground, then they would both kill themselves. Though they “made it,” they have nonetheless had to struggle with being possessed by drug addiction, feeling like they lose control:
Popping oxy Snorting roxy Body feeling like a zombie Never been a role model Never hear me say I’m sorry … I’ve been suicidal with them drugs up in my mama’s womb All these poppies Cock the shotty Barrell pressed against my body[ii]
To have the barrel pressed against your body because you have lost control to drugs and fame is not the same kind of “suicidal” as the being-towards-death that makes a suicide pact as a radical act of autonomy and rejection of the status quo. But these two kinds of suicidal ideation get mixed up in the underground.
Suicide from misery and loss of control is not equivalent to choosing when and how to exit. This is the contradiction within which mumble and Sound Cloud rappers find themselves today: drugs as escape, but escape as loss of control. Being honest about this contradiction and tarrying with it to the best of one’s ability has become the key to success and early death, as with Juice WRLD who, like Lil Peep, was well aware of what was coming:
If it wasn’t for the pills, I wouldn’t be here But if I keep taking these pills, I won’t be here, yeah[iii]
Mitch Luker of deathcore band Suicide Silence is another example. He lived on the edge and made himself a sacrifice for all the millions of teenagers who he felt needed to hear his message: It’s ok to be angry, it’s ok to throw a fit, it’s ok to freak out. “People feel so much pent up anger, they just need something to happen. When they hear my music, it triggers something and you never know what’s going to happen. You might punch someone in the face. You might…”[iv]
One of Suicide Silence’s most famous songs is about suicide. “No Pity for a Coward” has two major interpretations: Either it tells people who make fun of suicidal people to just kill themselves, or it tells people who say they are suicidal but don’t go through with it to just go through with it. As the famous line goes:
Seconds from the end What’s it gonna be Pull the trigger bitch
Suicide is suggested as radical autonomy: don’t be a coward, if you need to get out of this life, then get it over with—but if you are going to live, then the future is in your hands. But the contradiction in play here, between 1) a radically transgressive and empowering act vs. 2) being enslaved to one’s addictions or self-negating habits, manifests itself perfectly in Mitch Lucker’s tragic story.
Everything he did, all of the relentless touring, writing, and recording, was done for his daughter.[vi] But his wife couldn’t stop him from jumping on that motorcycle on the night of November 1st, 2012. If his family truly came first, and the mental health of his fans second, then what role did riding his motorcycle while sloppy drunk play?
Lucker lost control of his black 2013 Harley-Davidson in Huntington Beach at 8:55 p.m. on Halloween night and slammed into a Main Street light pole, police said in a news release. He died Thursday at University of California, Irvine, Medical Center.[vii]
All real fathers sacrifice to raise a healthy family. This means balancing “the pleasure principle” with “the reality principle.” If we are truly rational creatures who seek the ideals we rationalize as our main motivations, then everything is a balancing act between the necessary constraints of reality and the desire for a harmonious equilibrium for ourselves and our loved ones. But as Freud discovered late into his career, there is something “beyond the pleasure principle.” While Mitch Lucker, GG Allin, and the Suicide Boys all have their conscious ego relation to the concept of suicide as a radically autonomous act, they’re nonetheless split subjects like the rest of us.
Death drive and jouissance
We have the desire to live a peaceful and successful life, but all of our drives seek release in whatever outlets they get hooked into. Drive gets hooked on outlets that provide the subject jouissance. Jouissance is the feeling of intensity, exhilaration, drama, and risk, which threatens to overturn everything good we have going for us.
Where you get your jouissance is not fully in your own control. How one’s libidinal economy forms is unconscious, and largely based in formative experiences—traumas—and how we find ways of coping with these realities.[viii]
Take GG Allin again as the case in point: raised without running water or electricity by a religious fanatic father who threatened to kill him and his brother and mother. When his mother tried to escape, his father kidnapped and beat them. His life was a secluded living hell for ten years before his mother succeeded in escaping with them and getting a divorce.
Is it any surprise that, going through puberty, Allin’s first sexual experience was with his brother? Or that he developed a fetish for smelling his mother’s used feminine products, masturbating to the contents of toilets, and seeking out violence in every form? He said those early years made him strong with a warrior’s soul, so that he was better prepared to face anything and get what he wants.
While he was not quite a feral child, he was pretty close to one. Feral children are, by definition, creatures who only resemble humans. They lack the integration into language, its subjectivization and socialization that require, to some degree, the internalization of “law” and its No! When your father prohibits everything, when Law becomes synonymous with the absolute limitation on any possibility for freedom, how is one to develop a moral compass? It is possible only as a miracle.
What I am saying is a sort of secular version of, “There but for the grace of God go I.” My own upbringing could have broken my moral compass entirely, causing me to lose complete touch with the distinction between right and wrong. When the big Other is so oppressive that superegoic forms of inherent transgression are not enough to make the existing system of rules tolerable, or when inherent transgression is itself rendered impossible as a form of enjoyment, it is easy to “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” (Whether this was ever a choice or just dumb luck that put me on a path with a little more nuance and less harm is a philosophical question for the analytic philosophers, Sartre, or theology to decide.)
But if you did not grow up in extreme situations, then it is easy to think that only a specific “type” of person could develop a revolting and perverse outlet for getting their jouissance, much less to judge this “type” as “evil” or “a lost cause.” What’s easier is to consume information about such people because the disgust felt internally supports the unspoken, “Well, at least I’m not like that.” Spotting and condemning evil is always the favorite habit of a person who needs moral superiority on the cheap.
It is no surprise then that “cancel culture,” “virtue signaling,” or “performative wokeness,” which also gets called “weaponized identity politics,” have become so popular in countercultural spaces. If you cannot transgress any further than GG Allin, and this causes a serious split in the countercultural movement, then the formerly repressed social superego and big Other are doomed to return with a vengeance, this time under auspices of righteousness.
Subcultural spaces that style themselves as “transgressive” and “countercultural” celebrate themselves as having a special monopoly on seeing the contradictions of the “mainstream status quo,” however that is defined. They also become sites of roiling disavowed contradiction themselves: scenes that are founded on rejection of, resentment towards, and reaction against the big Other and/or its social superego lend themselves to ressentiment—which takes on different forms regardless of whether we mean GG Allin or Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance.
Death drive manifests in two main ways in underground scenes: those who take the rejection of social norms to the non-sustainable and unsurpassable extreme, and then the consequential return of the repressed superego. Shock rock, hardcore punk, and gangster rap in the 90s was followed by an explosion of hyper sensitive “woke” artists. Both of these forms of transgression are nonetheless “inherent transgression,” meaning they are easily incorporated into the status quo. Both are simultaneously sources of jouissance and ressentiment.
“Ressentiment” (to be pronounced in a pretentiously French-sounding way) is the experience of virtue felt by turning one’s vices into strengths. Nietzsche first discovered ressentiment, theorizing it as slave morality: the slave, having no power to conquer the master, much less courage to take his own life, instead does mental gymnastics to invert the master’s moral order. The master says, “I am good because I am the winner, the stronger, the ruler.” The slave’s unconscious says, “Well, if I cannot be good by the definition of that value framework, then I will invert the value framework and celebrate passivity, non-violence, or subtle forms of resistance that are the opposite of whatever is valued by the master: weakness is therefore strength, and winning in a corrupt world is losing one’s soul.”
It is too easy to turn one’s outsider status into a virtue. Because we couldn’t make it in high school, we consider those who were diligent and successful in their studies sellouts. Because we couldn’t see a future in academia for ourselves, we resent the professional managerial class (PMC). Because we are outsiders, drop outs, autodidacts, we see ourselves as somehow enlightened and above the bullshit.
More concerning is the tendency to celebrate transgression for its own sake. Hardcore punk and rap are divided between politically conscious messages and what seems like a stream of conscious channeling of the id, the vengeance of the repressed, the taking-on and performing of the stereotypes put on us by others: the glorification of self destruction and violence towards others.
The tendency for “ideology critique” when it comes to underground or independent music is to analyze music for its conformity, or for its explicit ideological messages. Stick To Your Guns and Immortal Technique are taken to be politically conscious and cutting edge, whereas Emmure and the Buffet Boys are seen as merely reproducing the ideology of toxic masculinity and capitalist accumulation; or in the case of “positive hardcore” (posi core) a band like No Bragging Rights is seen as “just self-help” because they are not political enough. (As though music can be more than medicine for mood modulation.) The “scene” becomes a site of fixation on explicit content, on political messages articulated, or critiques of the people who represent supposed movements or ideas. None of this gets to the level of critique we aim to take things at Theory Underground—i.e., Jouissance, ressentiment, and death drive, all as forms of consumerism that are fully invested in the reproduction of capital.
The fact is, on its own, music has no radical potential whatsoever. Artists sell us ways of coping, they might even help you break out of a rut, but they are also more likely to help you feel comfortable in your ruts. They sell us niche belonging. They make us feel special and different because we subscribe to something that does or says something that insults the sensibilities of those we dislike. If we’re being honest, music is just something to listen to and enjoy—it is not going to overthrow capitalism or pave the way forward for something genuinely new. But of course, the Left is full of people who come from punk or were inspired by it. Lots of activists and intellectuals got “radicalized” by political music, or at least appreciate the idea of underground scenes. No wonder the Left is a boutique phenomenon, and no wonder most theory critique of music focuses on the letter of what’s being said—as opposed to the level of enjoyment that is operative.
Oliver Anthony’s song Rich Men North of Richmond is being judged by many on the Left for failing to critique structurally or theoretically enough, i.e. for apparently taking a pot shot at people on welfare just as much as he blames the elite. This is “right wing populism” that is a dead end, according to leftists, including Slavoj Žižek, whose article on Anthony is titled: “Oliver Anthony does not have the answers: Right-wing protest songs only benefit the wealthy and powerful.”[ix] Never mind that, when the right-wingers at the first GOP presidential primary debate tried to appropriate Anthony’s image as a symbol for their Republican cause, Anthony responded by laughing about how ironic it was to see them do that, considering the fact that the song was about them. I saw that video thanks to Eamon AKA The Swoletariat, a contributor to this volume. When Eamon shared Anthony’s disavowal of the Republican politicians, he made a point about how Anthony’s song is just populist, not class conscious. What Swol and Zizek, as well as so many others, including Zac and Gavin at The Vanguard, all fail to realize, is that music is just meant to express what’s going on and how one feels. But instead of vibing with the moment, they use their education-based privilege to write off a popular song that expresses genuine class antagonisms, by holding it to a standard that should be reserved for politicians, influencers, and the rest of the PMC.
Oliver Anthony’s song is relatable to anyone who feels like their whole lifeforce (timenergy) is getting used up in return for shit wages while rich and poor alike sit around and talk shit or ignore altogether from the sidelines. The “Left” that cannot honor and dignify this core experience, while guiding it towards more productive ends, is the same Left that has died. “The Left is dead, and we have killed it!” Just kidding, I don’t believe we have that kind of power.
Look, I love you guys, but your knee-jerk dismissal and downplaying of Oliver Anthony’s heartbreaking song about having to go to work and knowing everything is bullshit is indicative of everything wrong with how we criticize things. The materialist Left’s trashing on Anthony was similar in attitude and mode to those cringelord Twitter people who “dunked” on this book because they didn’t like the graphic design or thought one or more of the authors was “problematic.” I think a lot of this is rooted in a smug and elitist form of enjoyment that gets jouissance holding a blue collar musician up to the standard by which one would judge an actual theorist or person of privilege. As though music needs to sound like Lenin, or as if Lenin would have been so dismissive in the event that a song like “Rich Men North of Richmond” goes viral. Any serious leader or representative of the working class would have, as Michael Downs pointed out in personal conversation, “finessed” the situation, appealing to the sentiment stirred up. I know people who cried when they heard that song. You guys don’t realize it, but you’re pissing on something that is very special to the hardest working people I know—the ones who grow your food, build your houses, and move it from point A to point B. People like us need our copeology, even if it is cut with a little simplistic populism every once in a while.
So what’s the potential of Theory Underground, or underground theory, for that matter? If music doesn’t have real large-scale structural change potential, what about “underground theory”? I’m not sure, but it seems different, important, and new that working class people and dropouts are tuning in to big ideas and thinking critically about things. But though it seems that way, couldn’t it also be just another niche consumer demographic? A circle jerk at the end of history?
It is too soon to tell. Underground theory is a new phenomenon. Only time will tell whether this “scene” can develop into a fertile intellectual milieu capable of growing some kind of movement. Most of the collaborators in this book have their own ideas of what underground theory is and what might be its potential. My goal is not to get the last word on this, but to instead provoke up and coming underground theorists to think seriously about what it means.
The main thing for now is this: transgression for its own sake might be fun, but it is not to be glorified. The “underground” is not necessarily better than the above ground—and in fact, it relies on the mainstream against which it antagonizes, resists, or seeks to overthrow.
The inspiration I take from underground music is the idea of doing things oneself. I love how in both underground punk and rap everyone was in a band or solo project, everyone was collaborating, everyone was always pushing their art. I love how in the hardcore music scene especially, bands like Black Flag, Mission From Burma, and Minor Threat were touring the country, going to small towns, staying for a week sometimes, playing the same sets over and over again day after day, connecting with regular people who are sick and tired of being fed the same thing over and over again on the radio.[x]
I take inspiration from the underground ethos of resisting the incentives of a system that wants me to pump out over-produced garbage that says nothing and does nothing that feels real, all for profit and fame. I take inspiration from the idea that I would rather die than sellout to a system that doesn’t care about art, love, or the intellect. At the same time, instead of fetishizing the grotesque, or celebrating self-destruction and suicide, my goal has been to always put the positive spin on it: What is the life worth living? What does that look like? How do we make it happen?
Considering the fact that we live in a distracted information-saturated age, I think understanding, concepts, and philosophy are essential. Because the university as an institution is in decline, there really is nowhere to go for those of us seeking radical growth. To that end, I take inspiration from the punk DIY ethos of doing things oneself. I know Adorno had a lot of scorn for this idea, and he should know because he definitely benefited from his full-time administrative staff, but he was also a domesticated house cat of a failing university system. He definitely didn’t see the potential for learning webs that we have today. I think technology has gotten us to the point where solo projects can prove a radical form of praxis.
Learning webs of solo projects, collaboration, and a DIY scene
The status quo is not static—it is change itself. This is not pure progress or regression, but is a complex set of tendencies and forces tangled up in a complex system that goes far beyond anything any of us are capable of comprehending. Yet we all have our sense for whether the general movement of history is positive or negative. This comes from our basic mood perhaps, our fundamental disposition, the spirit of the times we are tapped into—in either case, it is probably pure ideology.
Because we have some kind of a conception of why or how things are shitty and how they could be better, or of why we’re utterly fucked no matter what, it is worthwhile to turn to philosophy and theory to deconstruct our presuppositions and biases, so as to better hone in on the essence of the major tendencies playing themselves out.
To understand the tendencies of the current situation will give us a sense for how to counteract or ride those tendencies in ways that help us make some kind of difference, if not for the whole world, then at least for our own survival. I think part of the point of living the examined life is so that one can adjust expectations and strategies so as to lead a less miserable existence.
Authors and underground theorists in this work, such as Bryan Weeks, Ann Snelgrove, Cadell Last, Phillip Shinn, are keen on the fact that the institutions are failing us, that the existing system has no real future, and that we have to either take collective or at least personal action so as to break from its general inertia. We want to hack our way through the existing systems into something freer. What we want is freedom, but we also need structures. The structures exist, but are being mirrored and borrowed off of in uncritical ways that undermine the radical potential of leavers.
“Leavers” are those who “exit” the academic institutions. Angela Nagle said that we are likely to see mass leavers from universities the same way we have from mainstream media:
One vulnerability [the PMC has] is people of quality voluntarily leaving if the conditions allow it. An economically viable exit strategy that allows greater freedom, which is already happening in media, could conceivably happen in other institutions like academia, if someone figures out the right model. How long will [PMC] prestige last – the only thing they have to sell – if all the best scholars and thinkers that people want to hear from and that come up with new innovations leave and then use their years of pent up frustration to expose the institutional rot from the outside, as some break-away figures are doing with the media today?[xi]
A year or so after writing the above piece, Nagle appeared as a guest on the What’s Left podcast. In that conversation she references Justin Murphy as a solid example of this academic exit strategy.
In my first book, Waypoint, I also suggested that Justin Murphy might be an example of a radical alternative to the current academic situation. I like the idea of academics going their own way. The issue is that academics need administration, so they trade out their university’s admin for a platform. The goal with Theory Underground is to not be reliant on any of the platforms, but to have my own. When academics become free from the university they are too easily turned into functionaries of the attention economy. Seduced by the platform’s algorithms, we become little more than influencers. I used to be one. I felt its effect on me. The medium is not just the message, it also makes the messenger (political steamers like Vaush, Destiny, and Hasan are the medium! They are the algorithms personified!).
Genuine learning can be obtained to some degree on one’s own, but structures are necessary to coordinate efforts between lots of people. And lots of people, ideological diversity, and a robust plurality in the discourse of truth seekers, are all necessary grounds for overly corporate and risk averse spaces to become unique and potent places.
Non-belongers need to leave the non-places to experiment with making their own places for robust networks. Ivan Illich, in his Deschooling Society, proposes that “learning webs” could be the solution to break from the model of compulsory schooling that has done so much to undermine genuine education. What would that look like? Not a podcast. Not an individual brand, nor learning cooperative either.
What we need are a million experiments. Instead, most leavers do nothing to genuinely counter the tendencies of the attention economy or truly experiment with the technological means at our disposal. Thaddeus Russel calls his podcast Renegade University, but it’s just a podcast. Justin Murphy says he started a liberal arts college, but it was really just some one-off courses that are not available on demand after the fact, so once he burnt out, it went away. Nor was it obvious that they were part of a coherent and grander vision for fostering the conditions necessary for a community of truth-seekers, much less cutting edge theorists. Rather than just sit on the sidelines and nitpick at other people’s experiments, I wanted to do all of the things I wished someone else would try.
Universities may be here to stay, but there is a possible future wherein those who have exited do the work to counter both the worst tendencies of the university and the attention economy. By showing that the bureaucratic glut, commercialization, and censorship at universities are unnecessary and can be dispensed with, we prove what is possible. This will force change. But instead of doing anything that can do that, leavers get seduced by the algorithmic incentives of the attention economy and become edgy culture warrior content pumping machines.
The contradictions in the university have led to an explosion of new projects as individuals leave the institutions and new groups form. But those groups become new institutions that, in their own ways, mirror the worst tendencies of what they have exited. The thing is, I owe a tremendous debt to all of those who have courageously attempted to do something different. In the same way that I see things that I want to correct for, there will be people like Michał Rams-Ługowski in this book will have critiques of how centralized Theory Underground is. I guess this just comes down to a difference in perspective because I don’t think small media projects are effective when decentralized. For instance, those who have tried to unionize, collectivize, or “democratize” Current Affairs or TYT (The Young Turks), or even a small business like Mina’s World[xii] or a pizza shop in downtown Boise, completely miss that such singular entities built around individual personalities and their networks would exist in any ideal society. The point is to not let them rule the world, of course, but if people don’t have the freedom to do what they want on an expanded scale, then it wouldn’t be a society worth living in. Yet “decentralization” is upheld as a supreme value. I just do not think of them as effective or fun.
All of the existing alternative theory education organizations I have seen so far are no exception—most courses are in fact little more than discussion groups. Their on-demand content is mostly just people name-dropping, free associating, and assuming everyone else “gets it” all without any way of providing introductory on demand-courses, accountability and assessment structures, or a way to keep the discourse going on after the fact in spaces dedicated to the specific subject-matter. These are all tendencies Theory Underground aims to counter, though I’m sure the failures will be myriad. Hopefully my failures will inspire others to do better than me.
Every leaver sees what needs to be fixed in different ways, understanding the problems in their own terms. I think any genuinely robust “movement” would be made up of hundreds of singular experiments doing things that nobody in existing institutions would have ever dreamed of doing. This is why I am for one person colleges in a network of what Ivan Illich called “learning webs.”[xiii]
Learning webs don’t need boards. Learning webs don’t need massive funding or big teams. Those only slow things down with administrative nonsense and more interpassive knowledge games where nobody does the work because everyone else supposedly did it already, where everyone takes ownership for each accomplishment so nobody makes their own.
In a world where everything is always falling apart and accelerating, what we need are the kinds of structures that help us corral certain flows of energy, interest, and research into contained spaces that are themselves considered experiments dedicated to specific outcomes. If in the Sixties the idea was that everyone knows enough and we don’t need lectures, just flipped classrooms and “dropping out” to “tune in,” today we need the opposite: lectures that assume an audience supposed-to-have done the reading and be confused.
Anything less lowers the bar and we have nothing genuinely worth tackling to rise against. In the original version of this book there were going to be a lot more of my writings theorizing the underground. I have written a few pieces that critique tendencies that are fostered by the attention economy, that are ultimately self-undermining for underground theorists. For anyone interested in countering self-defeating tendencies in themselves when it comes to doing philosophy on the internet, I recommend “Three Principles of Study as a Way of Life” and “Mastery vs. Students Supposed to Know.”[xiv] For now those are available on the Theory Underground website; they will be published in a future volume. Suffice it to say, I am very critical of my own tendency to take the easy way out. These articles are meant to get me to step up my game but hopefully encourage fellow travelers to do so as well.
Most of what leavers do hardly takes advantage of what’s truly possible. They fail to make their own learning platforms and instead get seduced by the attention awarded to influencers by the distraction economy. The solution is to instead become genuine participants in learning webs.
Genuinely cutting edge learning webs will probably look like professors being one-person colleges confederated in a larger underground DIY scene where genuine discourse is engaged in over decades and real contradictions get fleshed out over time. To do this, we don’t need more “boards.” The administration can be replaced by AI. We aren’t quite there yet, which is why we need people like me to experiment with juggling virtually all aspects of the operation simultaneously.
What I bring to the dynamic is absurd amounts of obsessive energy and being just good enough at a lot of different things to pull off essentially building a one-person college that is both online and offline, has its own social media platform (and app!), is independent of corporate and state sponsorship, and even has a publishing house. As I said, AI will replace most of the administrative bullshit, but for now, people who can DIY the whole thing are needed. I consider myself an experiment in what one person can accomplish. Those who are interested in what’s going to be possible in the very near future are already taking note.
With all that said, though, it’s of course not just me. I have collaborated with everyone in this volume, I have co-taught courses, and everything I have accomplished relies on the buy-in from at least 20 to 50 pretty dedicated and obsessive fellow travelers. Nothing I do would have ever been possible without Bryan Weeks, Michael Downs, Elton L.K., and Ann Snelgrove; the same goes for Bryce Nance, the one student who has taken all of my courses so far! You guys make it possible, for real, because otherwise I’d just be talking to myself.
My point is simply that none of my fellow travelers need to concern themselves with administrative nonsense. None of them have to build the website and keep it up to date. Everyone gets to use the course-gated social media site without having to worry about all the WordPress plugins it requires, the constant trouble-shooting, and all the rest of the developer nightmares that I have undertaken as a daily chore for these last six months. In the future, I think we will all be able to have what I have with Theory Underground, and network from our own little course-site islands (or, in the theme of neofeudalist realism, we’ll all have our own fiefdoms!), without having to worry about all this administrative and developer bullshit that I am currently wrestling with every day.
But why do I feel the need to make it what it is? A lecture-course gated social media site and publishing house is meant to counter the fact that all spaces online are non-places where mere chatter lowers the bar even further while making us feel like something has been achieved.
Philosophy and theory being mixed with courses on practical living and diverse subject matters coupled with principles from language learning communities is meant to counter how all the above have lost something special in isolation from one another.
By utilizing gamification, social media, and YouTube in strategic ways, I hope we are able to counter the worst tendencies of the attention economy while doing something that matters. Ways of using the master’s tools that become beneficial. Something something. I hate this paragraph. Whatever. I get more into this stuff in the article on “Three Principles of Study as a Way of Life” (cited earlier).
The point is to compensate with what positive manifestations expose as lacking while utilizing the tools and tendencies in the current situation to overcome its worst dynamics. Most of the worst tendencies are ones that we feel every day. Turning education into a form of social or cultural capital used to hoard virtue over working people while creating a prestige class of discursive Taylorists[xv] is one of the most noxious tendencies undermining any approximation of the idea of the university. Exposing the PMC for its function in meritocracy, virtue hoarding, division, and the overall reproduction of a class society, has therefore been put front and center with everything TU does (and I defend my use of this term “PMC” against the cheap and dogmatic dismissals in my piece within this volume called “Lefter Than Thou”).
Likewise, the tendency to challenge reifications of the two-party, two-ideology, two-side lesser-evilest establishment, (in a word, “duopoly”) and all the alternative, indie, and leaver spin offs who mirror it, has been central to Theory Underground.
“We” have experimented with horizontalism and group collaboration enough for a hundred years. What is needed now are trees with rhizomatic root systems, islands with strong shipping routes, and micro dictatorships with reliable rail systems between city states.
There was a time when I used the term “we” instead of “I” in some kind of way that deflected attention from the subject of enunciation. Now I’ll just say it: I am doing a lot of experiments that achieve things nobody is even thinking about trying to undertake right now. Sorry to toot my own horn, but I just spent six months building an app and getting it live on the Google Play and Apple Stores, but when I announced it there was virtually no response besides a couple of my buddies who “get it.” Educators having their own apps, their own platforms, their own networks, is new. And I think it’s the most exciting thing ever! I believe that doing stuff like this will spark radical imagination for others by showing them what is plausibly within reach.
There are those who are scared of anything singular, they want universality only and they see anything singular as particular only. What they forget is that we are all potentially singular, and that a robust dialectic between particular and universal is necessary to hone singularity, and vice versa.
If the punk scene was made up of leavers and rejects who all had their own DIY projects, then underground theorists and renegade academics who give a shit about combating the worst tendencies of a class society while experimenting with alternatives need to learn how to build their own platforms, corral their own interests, and contain conversations in a way that moves them from the plain of non-places into bases from which to develop structures into the realm of height.
The goal of Theory Underground is to see what can be done in five years with the plan being that anyone who gets seriously involved will also receive a crash course in how to do it themselves. What I hope will come from this is a whole lot of other experiments. I’m going to be transparent about funding, the budget, and tools used. Anyone else will be, ostensibly, able to achieve more using less, because I will have done the work when it was more costly and difficult. I’ll set up a course eventually to show others how to do it themselves.
Everyone in this volume is experimenting with these new frontiers and possibilities in their own ways. This book was originally going to be just a collection of my own essays and some of Michael Downs’s blog posts, but when Slavoj Žižek told me he was going to gift me a manuscript to publish, I decided to invite some fellow travelers and renegade academics to participate. I did NOT expect that most of the people I asked for submissions would actually follow through. I expected that only half would follow through. Instead, they all did! So this is a huge volume. No apologies!
The material in this volume spans a lot of topics and is composed of many different styles. The content has been carefully selected and combined to be read as a Whole. What matters more than peoples’ “takes” or “positions” is the subject-matter itself, all of which will be the basis for future courses, conferences, and conversations.
This is where Underground Theory really gets started. What you’re holding in your hands is the product of a whole lot of research, consideration, passion, and fun! I admire all of the people in this volume for different reasons and in different ways, and am proud to call them fellow travelers. I hope that, whether you are reading or listening to this book, that you find something in it life-changing for the better. I hope it inspires you to think and write on your own, for yourself. Maybe you’ll even end up taking some Theory Underground courses, or we will meet up on tour. Either way, I look forward to either talking about this work with you, or at least hearing your thoughtful reflections on its chapters via the form shared throughout volume.[xvi] In conclusion, I would just like to say, welcome to the underground. Let’s get started!
[i] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (An Essay in Atheistic Religion), (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 54
[xv] See my chapter “Lefter Than Thou: Enjoyment and Discursive Taylorism” in this volume.
[xvi] You can use this link, which is also throughout the book, to give us feedback on your favorite pieces: https://theory-underground.com/underground-theory
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