Forums

[B Nance]

What are forums in the first place?

Just kidding, I’m not gonna do that, we all know what forums are, they’re where we are right now.

I have been telling myself, everyday for the past couple months, that I need to engage more on the forums. This is the place where I should be taking the fleeting, tangential thoughts and silly questions that come up while reading the texts and during the lectures, and at the very least sharing them if not following them down their paths with other, knowledgeable people. This is the place where I should ask for advice or clarification on a thing I’m struggling with, or just bounce some shit off some people. There doesn’t even need to be a valid reason, I’m here, just like everyone else, because I believe it’s worth being here, and part of that is the collective effort to understand these things – we can’t pretend we’re all already masters. There has been, however, a hesitancy in myself that I don’t even want to acknowledge, because it makes me feel like a goof. I have that problem, see, feeling like a goof all the time, and I usually take it poorly when it turns out to be true, so I most often just avoid situations in which I might “be the goof.” That’s not a good way to go through life though, trust me, I’ve been doing this shit for a minute, and I wish I could be any other way.

But, I usually find a way to navigate through social situations to make it look like I’m actually really fucking cool, without ever actually being really fucking cool. It’s a cool trick I learned back in junior high, after I got thrown into a trash can and severely fucked with. I actually fucked that guy’s girlfriend a few months after he did that, I played the whole “Yeah, fuck that guy cause he’s a douche, but not me, I’m a cool, sensitive dude” card, I learned how to trick people into not throwing me into trash cans by performing the role that I realized they wanted me to play. And, now I don’t even know who I am, aside from a fucking goof who is constantly trying to avoid the interiors of trash cans.

I am an empty vessel. And, not just an empty vessel, but a broken one. Broken from nearly four decades of trials, tribulations and tragedies, disappointments and disenfranchisement, losses and lack. You know those Japanese pots that are broken and then put back together with molten gold? I’m one of those. The thing is, I don’t have any gold to molt, and I’m pretty sure pouring that shit all over my body would fuck me up pretty good. In the stead of gold, I have taken to using this Theory shit to try and put myself back together. For years I searched and sought for answers to my questions, “What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?” and shit like that; I was convinced that those answers could be found hidden somewhere in ancient philosophical treatises and texts, historical works that laid bare social and political, and even economic, systems, and modern reflections and rehashing of these old ideas, with a novel concept thrown in here or there for good measure. Now I’m less sure whether those answers even exist, but focusing on those answers kinda misses the point. I am convinced that, rather than these answers, there are better questions to be found, and better tools to aid in the search for them; and, honestly, better reasons to keep on living than the silly bullshit that had kept me barely limping by before – material possessions and social status and arbitrary win/loss conditions in games that nobody even wants to play anymore but just can’t find a way to escape.

I’m a fucking idiot, and it’s totally okay. I don’t know a damn thing about anything, or anything that matters in any real way, but again, that’s okay. We’re all silly, foolish, fumbling creatures, and we’re all stuck on this boat and we can’t move the rudder, and we don’t even know if the steersman exists anymore, and we’re headed toward a giant fucking iceberg field. And, that’s okay too, or at least it has to be, because the only way we can do anything about, if we ever can at all, is to resist panic and be deliberate and figure shit out.

Sometimes I have an idea that I think is good, and I want to share it with the world, or at least other people. My partner does her best, but there are only so many nights she can stay up past our bedtime listening to me ramble on about Solar Anuses and Symbolic Orders and dead perverted French dudes, so I usually wind up keeping almost everything to myself; and of course Google’s bitch ass. But, I want to share my ideas. I do, sometimes, feel like I’m on to something, and I feel like maybe someone would appreciate my two cents, or that maybe they might, collectively along with a bunch of other people’s, be valuable in a real sense.

Dave has spent a decade crafting this conceptual object that is here embodied as Theory Underground, where absolute units like Mikey, and many others but we’re using Mikey as an example because he’s fucking dope, can swing their dick around and strut their stuff and slam dunk on the rest of The Internet in itself. It’s a really cool place, and it’s full of really cool people, and here be dragons, and I want to engage with and learn from and grow alongside them; but I keep finding myself trying to avoid trash cans. I think I can put my faith in the fact that there are no trash cans around here, and if I do find myself inside one it will be because I brought it along with me.

I want to ask silly questions and be a bit goofy, because I am in fact a silly goof, and I can’t learn or grow or do any of these life-sustaining things if I’m constantly on the defensive and worried about my profile.

So, I said all that to say, thanks Dave! For your baby, this Theory Underground, where we can come as students and truly (attempt to) live up to that. And thanks, Mikey, for your years of diligence and dedication to this whole theory shit. And thanks, you Yung Zizekians, and all you people here who are dedicated to dancing with dragons, and who are willing to give of your wealth of experience and knowledge and, most preciously, your Timenergy. And, finally, I hope that I will get over myself and get my ass in the forums with my silly and goofy questions, and be as disciplined a student as I can.

Thank you, we fuckin love you Modesto!

Discussion

[Łukasz Silski]

The point about avoiding ‘seeming like a goof’ is so relatable that it actually hurts. After finishing high school I felt like shit, on, like, every level of existence. I decided to go and study theory and philosophy simply because everything else seemed worthless. Until recently I thought I was learning in order to be a good ‘leftist’, a ‘politically literate’ person who could be useful to others. Yeah, sure. Of course, the truth is that I did it in order to avoid going insane. The other side of this is that I moulded all of that learning into a kind of barrier which allowed me to separate myself from genuine criticism coming from others, from situations in which I would have to show my lack (of knowledge, of confidence, of a general sense of what I am doing) – so what if I cannot explain what I am doing with my life, after all: this is theory! this is hard! this is supposed to be ‘useless’! And, of course, if I cannot explain what I am learning, this is because it is ‘hard’, something ‘next level’. Works like a charm: just use jargon and don’t engage in anything which could genuinely hurt your ego … what a ton of shit. I think that a big reason for why I value this place, this environment which Pleeb, Mikey and others are creating, is that this sort of behavior is exposed here as what it is – a shitty self-flattering discourse which does not amount to anything much but a fake sense of comfort, comfort in knowing that no one will ever see you lose the ground beneath your feet. I hope that I can somehow contribute to this without falling back into … that.

[David McKerracher]

Finally got around to responding to this! @Nance @Maddaddam and @Ossen

https://www.youtube.com/live/bD9mWXO10uk?feature=share

• This reply was modified 11 months ago by  David McKerracher.

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