We need leaders. But first, we need teachers, i.e. subjects supposed to know and teach their field. It’s time for theory professors to stop pretending they are in the clinic.

If you ever take online courses in the world of theory, then you likely know teaching is rare. Instead, we get people who are trying to refuse the role of “subject supposed to know” (see below).

While this sounds good in theory, how it actually pans out is a big waste of time for anyone who actually does the readings. If you struggle with the hardest sections of the hardest works in theory, writing about your confusion, and then come hoping for clarification by way of seeing

1. genuine attempts at disciplined and principled interpretations advanced,
2. contradictions thoroughly worked through and defended from different perspectives in a rigorous and critically self-conscious manner, much less
3. concepts elucidated with various examples,

then you will most likely be irritated to instead hear a bunch of people who did not do the reading “saying the things that one says” when they have come out the other side of an education system that normalizes perpetual imposter syndrome and social signaling rather than genuine, rigorous, and sustained critical dialogue or growth.

Instead of getting to hear someone who has read and re-read and re-re-read the text in an attempt to get a firm grasp of the subject-matter, you are likely to see that person turn things over to questions and community contributions — something usually done under the auspices of “flipping the class room,” trying to be “anti-authoritarian horizontalist rhizomes,” and “refuse” the position of “subject supposed to know.”

The Subject Supposed to Know

The “subject supposed to know” is an effect of transference and is as such structurally impossible in the first person: he is by definition “supposed to know” by another subject. (Looking Awry, 1991, p. 62)

The “subject supposed to know” is a concept from Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the clinic, patients (analysands) unconsciously put the analyst in the position of the subject supposed to know the solution to their fundamental problems. Žižek says it best in his short work How to Read Lacan:

In a slightly different way, this is how the psychoanalyst as the ‘subject supposed to know’ functions in the treatment: once the patient is engaged in the treatment, he has the same absolute certainty that the analyst knows his secret (which only means that the patient is a priori ‘guilty’ of hiding a secret, that there is a secret meaning to be drawn from his acts). The analyst is not an empiricist, probing the patient with different hypotheses, searching for proofs; instead, he embodies the absolute certainty (which Lacan compares to the certainty of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum) of the patient’s unconscious desire. For Lacan, this strange transposition of what I already know in my unconscious onto the figure of the analyst is at the core of the phenomenon of transference in the treatment: I can only arrive at the unconscious meaning of my symptoms if I presuppose that the analyst already knows their meaning. The difference between Freud and Lacan is that while Freud focused on the psychic dynamics of transference as an intersubjective relationship (the patient transfers onto the figure of the analyst his feelings about his father, so that when he seems to talk about the analyst, he ‘really’ talks about his father), Lacan extrapolated from the empirical wealth of transferential phenomena the formal structure of the presupposed meaning.1

This dynamic puts the patient in a state of infantile dependence. Whereas most therapists cultivate this for profit and esteem, the Lacanian analyst has the incredibly difficult job of foiling the analysand’s desire, resisting transference, and refraining from giving authoritative advice or interpretations.

Lacanian analysts, if they are serious about the theoretical side of things, nevertheless psychoanalyze their patients, they just refrain from giving interpretations. The point is to lead the patient to their own interpretations. This is based in the idea that someone else pointing out your problems or seemingly obvious interpretations results in those problems re-locating. We are all too proficient at adapting to outside-critiques in a way that doesn’t actually change anything from the inside-out.

This is all fine and good, and I hope we all get to pursue this kind of process in the clinic. But teachers are not analysts. This should be obvious, but for some reason the theorists who are most influenced by Lacan, or his heretical disciple Guattari, are dead set on “teaching” in a way that refuses to lecture.

A specter is haunting radical class rooms: The specter of The 1960s New Left.

Occupy Wall Street was a perfect example of how certain assumptions from the New Left are still alive and well today: a form of critique that sees verticality as the root of all oppression (in this framework “hierarchy” becomes a stand-in signifier for “bad”), authority as equivalent to authoritarianism, and the signifiers “horizontal” and “democratic” as cure-alls or supreme goals.

Any American who was around for Bernie or BLM activism in the last seven years should know full well how those Occupy values live on to undermine movement energies. As the horizontalist actvist’s favorite educator Starhawk made clear in her book on horizontal organizing, such “direct-democracy” forms of anti-vertical organizing can be very empowering and useful for short-term efforts.

But don’t take that on faith from me, I will share with you the definitive quote. Before sharing, I really want to emphasize that in anarchist and permaculture/eco-village organizing communities, Starhawk has been one of the most well-known educators in horizontalist political organizing for almost fifty years — though she got a huge boost during Occupy, and has taken a serious hit in the last few years thanks to how insularly-cannibalistic the idpol-intersectionalist-BLM Left has become. But more on that later.

What follows is not just Starhawk’s principled and preferred approach to organizing, but it also sums up the assumptions and preferences of the New Left from America to France — this is, then, the practical bullet point version of what Deleuze and Guattari are getting at when they say at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus, “We are tired of trees.”

Collaborative is the term I’ve chosen to describe groups that are based on shared power and the inherent worth and value of each member. Brafman and Beckstrom, in The Starfish and the Spider, characterize what they call starfish groups as very amorphous and fluid. Because power and knowledge are distributed, individual units quickly respond to a multitude of internal and external forces — they are constantly spreading, growing, shrinking, mutating, dying off and reemerging. This quality makes them very flexible.2

How do I define a collaborative group? It’s a group that has most if not all of the following characteristics:

• Structured as circles, webs or networks, not pyramids or trees
• Groups of peers, with a horizontal structure, working together to create something and to make decisions
• Groups without formal authority, no bosses that can hire or fire you. (In some hybrid groups, that authority might exist but be rarely and reluctantly imposed.)
• Businesses that run collectively or cooperatively
• Groups where the major reward may not be money, but something else — creative fulfillment, impact on the world, spiritual development, personal growth, or friendship
• Often formed around strong, altruistic values — from saving the world to sharing knowledge to religious observation or community celebration
• Groups of humans — which means that motives of gain, status and power do come into play, if not overtly, then covertly
• Groups that often have few or no overt rules, but many norms
• Often ephemeral, for better or worse [my emphasis] 2

The crucial point, for anyone who cares about long-term, wide-scale, and fundamental forms of transformation capable of counter-acting the political and economic structures that produce and subtend mainstream culture, is obviously the last one: “[Collaborative, rhizomatic, horizontalist groups, circles, and networks are] often ephemeral, for better or worse.”

Whereas Reich, Marcuse, and Deleuze and Guattari saw the liberation of desire and general release of all that had hitherto been repressed as a genuine opportunity for overcoming capital, Capital had no problem at all adapting.

Activists and hippies famously burnt out and then opted back in for “the long march through the institutions,” filling the ranks of what Barbara Ehrenreich documented and theorized as the emerging “professional managerial class” (PMC).3 It turned out that creative sublimation and personal forms of counter-cultural transgression were hyper-amenable to the development of consumer capitalism. In this context, “radical activism” became a phase one goes through as a rite of passage to adult progressive careerism.

As Benedict Cryptofash recently dragged out in delightful detail, there are still rosy eyed “radical” progressives in academia touting the personal transformations spurred on by Occupy.4 Cryptofash’s case in point is Gabriel Winant, a self-congratulatory history professor at the University of Chicago whose account of Occupy is particularly revealing:

Whereas others looking back on the past decade would be hard-pressed to discern how Occupy did anything to disrupt the capitalist development it protested, Winant defines the success of Occupy in terms of the formative influence its shared experience had on a budding generation of “ideological” workers in academia and other cultural fields. Occupy’s inability to transform the objective society is not important because, for Winant, it did something more profound: it changed the subjectivities of the important people whose experiences within Occupy would inform their professional roles in cultural institutions. Indeed, the participants “would change not the state but themselves, and then carry that change with them elsewhere.”

“Ephemeral” forms of organizing is especially convenient if all one is going for is short-term feelings of personal transformation and bragging rights to put on one’s virtual resume or C.V., especially if that is to be done as fast as possible. While it is hard to imagine many people consciously choosing to “accelerate” a process that needs slow deliberation and time to develop, much less doing so for cynical reasons such as building their C.V., it is even harder to imagine that so many would go this route if it was inconvenient in the short-term.

“Ephemeral” means passing out of existence almost as fast as it came in, relative to the human timeframe. A good example of ephemeral organizing: Think CHAZ, the anarchist mutual aid “society” that popped up for a couple of months during the height of the 2020 George Floyd protests in Seattle—before people died and they realized they wanted cops and ambulances after all. Christopher F. Rufo wrote about one of the most telling moments from that series of events:

On June 10, with the goal of building consensus and designating leadership for the movement, protesters organized the first CHAZ People’s Assembly. After setting up a stage and PA system, one of the initial speakers raised the question of legitimate authority, asking the audience: “What’s the structure, how are we going to achieve some sort of communal hierarchy that we all feel comfortable with?” The audience booed and insisted that the movement should remain “horizontal” and leaderless. At the end of the People’s Assembly, racial-justice activist Julie Chang Shulman conceded that no leadership had been established but that the group had settled on the ideological principles of an “abolitionist framework” and “commitment to solidarity and accountability to Black and Indigenous communities.”5

While these kinds of pseudo symbolic theatrics are transformative for the individuals who will go around talking about how they “did something” for the rest of their lives, nothing really ever changes. As in activism, so in academia, where “accelerating everything” is seen as a prime objective — to the point of throwing out the idea of any canon at all, saying reading and rationality is white, or that we must graduate students faster so they can go do activism.

A perfect example of this is when Cornel West went on the news to talk about his article in defense of “Western classics.”6 He made the basic and undeniable point that there is inherent value to having a basis in the history of ideas, and with that, studying “Western” classics.

To make things interesting and seem balanced, MSNBC brought on the president of Howard University so that he could respond to Cornel’s criticisms live. While it is interesting and worth watching on your own, I will here paraphrase the crucial moments where the university president let on more than he perhaps meant to:

"We are focused on contemporizing the experience... so that black students can apply these ideas. They have to go out into the world where they will see George Floyd murdered. So rather than asking our students so much about their major, we are asking them about their mission. So while they will still have classic elements, they will also have progressive activist elements." … [He then goes on to say that this means speeding up the degree process so they can] "get out there sooner."

This is good business if what you aim to do is produce the capitalist fast-food version of the highly sought-after corporate-consumer-commodity called “the activist-scholar.”

Critiques that use buzzwords like “instrumentalization” or “neoliberalism” granted and put aside for brevity’s sake, this is just capitalism pushing the university into diploma-mill territory under the banner of social justice. To play off of Nancy Pelosi’s outrageous, almost funny if not grotesque, and cringe-worthy statement of gratitude to George Floyd:

“Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice. For being there to call out to your mom — how heartbreaking was that — call out for your mom, ‘I can’t breathe,'” Pelosi said. Floyd’s name “will always be synonymous with justice,” she said.7

The tragic case of George Floyd here becomes the image and rationale of making the progressive branded capitalist university more efficient at turning out its primary commodity: PMC-qualified labor power with woke labeling to make any state or corporate office appear socially conscious — which should always be read as the real motive: litigation proof — Robin DiAngelo H.R. workshop style.8

Hopefully, dear reader, you are able to see on your own the way this mentality plays into accelerating little more than careers, while simultaneously speeding up the decline of intellectual standards and culture — all very convenient to the modern university that is, as Karl Jaspers warned against, “an intellectual department store with an abundance of goods for every taste.”9

These last ten minutes or so might have felt like a detour of sorts, but I believe this is the proper context within which modern theory is taught. It is, insofar as we can compare now to the sixties, the intellectual and activist climate within which Jacques Lacan taught. What made sense for him to do then is not what we need now.

Professors, who are not clinicians, please stop assuming “Students Supposed To Know” – we need you to profess

Whereas Jacques Lacan was without doubt a master who did everything he could to practice what he taught up-and-coming analysts by putting his own position into question and frustrating the desire of his students with playful and entertaining games, what we need today, more than ever, are teachers.

Unless the professor in question is training up analysts who will practice the Lacanian method in the clinic, it is debatable to what degree Lacan’s teaching method can be usefully adopted into different contexts where the goals are something other than the practice of psychoanalysis.

The “subject supposed to know” does not get out of the unconscious position they symbolically hold by just playing the hippie-to-PMC “flipped class room” game. To learn anything we must be duped. I am not saying professors should dupe themselves into believing they are actual masters, but they should not refuse us a genuine attempt at playing the role.

It is highly doubtful that professors or teachers, whether within or outside of the contemporary university, benefit in any intellectual way by refusing to lecture. While it grants the illusion of something radical happening, what really happens is they are let off the hook for having to come prepared — while seemingly beneficial in terms of time and energy management in the midst of a chaotic academic session filled with administrative meetings and grading, this tendency is detrimental in the long-run.

Not only do students then also come unprepared, learning instead not the concepts themselves but rather “how one talks about them,” tending to revert to “hot takes,” insular jargon without useful examples, and name-dropping — this is indeed the tendency — but something worse also occurs.

Jo Freeman was a feminist activist from the 1960s whose critique of horizontalism should be read by everyone. Marxists will of course already have their own criticisms, as did Marx, of both democracy and anarchism, but we cannot forget that the New Left’s non-Marxism (I hesitate to say “anti-Marxism”) was based in a legitimate revulsion to what had become of “worldview Marxism” as a dogmatic rationalization of totalitarian state-capitalism and various forms of organizing Marx would have most likely disavowed. So, though Marxists have both legitimate disagreements and criticisms, the tendency of these to become ossified thought-terminating scripts must be refreshed by way of supersession.

Jo Freeman’s critique of purported horizontalism falls prey to certain undermining assumptions couched within the common sense of her time, but the main thrust of her argument is useful and worth reading and re-reading. In The Tyranny of Structurelessness, she shows how the pseudo woke disavowal of formal structures always leaves in tact the organic structures imposed by personality.10

Formal structures are, in this view, a necessary evil meant to counter-act organic hierarchies that form around charismatic personalities, which is a natural enough thing that should not be squashed or discouraged, merely counter-balanced by way of formal structures.

Take away the formal structure of a lecture in a class room by calling it “flipped” or “a seminar” and what you get is not structureless, nor is it a refusal of the subject supposed to know position — the relative experts and charismatic personalities will only dominate more, only now without doing anything useful.

In a recent discussion group I got to see firsthand, week after week, how a professor playing this game became the de facto “answerer” commenting on everyone else’s “contributions.” Instead of lecturing or doing some kind of exegesis of the text, it was like a weekly two-hour question and answer period where, out of fifty viewers, seven people repeatedly raised their hands and then, once called on, would offer their two-cents that would then be reflected on by the professor who either agreed or said he disagreed, usually without any more serious treatment than the occasional reference to outside literature. What was talked about the least? The subject matter of the seminar itself.

Lectures might have a tendency to be dry, boring, recycled, or overly formalistic, but without the structure of the lecture, all that is left are the personalities that nonetheless pose as subject supposed to know.

When professors attempt to refuse the position of subject supposed to know, having let themselves off the hook of actually unpacking the subject matter in a critically rigorous manner, they instead fall into the trap of supposing the student to know.

Both myself and Mikey, the two most working class people you will find lecturing in the world of theory today, do not suppose ourselves to be the experts, but nonetheless we are willing to try our best to say what feel confident about regarding a thinker, text, or concept. That is why our interview-lecture series LACAN 101 and ŽIŽEK 101 have been so refreshing for so many people.

Before turning to the decisive quote that inspired this post, I want to give one of the best lecturers of the 20th Century an opportunity to say what a lecture actually is, or ought to be. In The Idea of the University, a work I am currently teaching with my compatriots Ann and Bryan, Karl Jaspers is writing to those who are most responsible for re-building the university in the aftermath of the Nazi regime.

Jaspers defends the Idea of the University against business interests on the one hand, and on the other: the interests of politically totalitarian groups who would silence genuine disagreements under the auspices of ideological purity. This section is from when he discusses the role and function of the lecture itself:

Lectures have held pre-eminence in teaching for ages. They present the materials to be learned in such a way that the listener can visualize how and for what reasons they were collected. Bare facts can be gathered from books. In lectures the listener takes notes and is compelled to think about the lecture. He prepares himself for lectures by doing experiments, studying books, and extending his knowledge. One cannot establish a standard for good lectures. If they are good they have a special quality which cannot be imitated. Their intended meaning, differing widely with the personality of the lecturer, is valuable in each case. There are lectures which aim to instruct and personally involve the listener, which seek to hold him intellectually; and there are lectures where the speaker, totally oblivious to his audience, engages in a monologue about research in progress, yet even so manages to impart a sense of genuine participation in genuine research. Lectures which aim to sum up an entire subject are in a class by themselves. They are indispensable, for they awaken the impulse to envisage the whole, provided thorough work on the details is being pushed at the same time. Such lectures should be given only by the most mature professors drawing upon the sum total of their lifers work. There should therefore be general lectures by the most outstanding professors on each, of the basic subjects treated as wholes.11

For those lucky enough to actually sit in the presence of someone who lives and breathes a field their whole life giving an introductory lecture, you know intimately what so many privileged academics take for granted, which everyone else less privileged has never had the opportunity to experience firsthand.

This brings us, finally, to a quote Duane Rousselle, a popular Žižekian sociologist, shared from Slavoj Žižek. This gets us to the heart of the matter:

“To go to the end, one has to correct Lacan. The ultimate, most radical, subjective position, is not that of the analyst. […] After achieving this, the only way to avoid cynicism is to heroically pass to the position of a new master. At this point, things get really philosophical, so I want to stop.” – Slavoj Zizek

Duane Rousselle quoting Slavoj Žižek

What we need is a new master? While so many will assume this means we need a new Lenin, I think a more important analogy is that we need a new Marx. The problem is, his existence presupposed a certain intellectual climate that would have been impossible without the professors who made German Idealism what it was.

What we need are those professors for a new era, but it seems nobody is yet willing to try. Nobody is yet willing to say, “Ok, I’ve mastered this. I will teach it.” We have that for Capital and Being and Time, thanks to David Harvey and Hubert Dreyfus, respectively, but for Lacan and Žižek? The closest you will find is what Mikey and I have made available on our spare time while working as laborers.

Slavoj’s dear friend Todd McGowan comes closest to someone who is breaking this stuff down to intro levels. The work McGowan has done on his YouTube channel, as on the Why Theory podcast, as well as amazing works like Capitalism and Desire or Emancipation After Hegel, have set a new standard for making big ideas accessible online in the world of theory today.

Mikey is a sort of protégé of McGowan, and an up and coming fellow traveler of Rousselle and the other Žižekian-Lacanians. The reason Mikey has, in a sort of way, placed McGowan in the master position, is because Mikey knows how hard it is to do what McGowan strives to do with every fiber of his being, which is find new ways of making concepts accessible by way of relatable examples.

“The Mikey Standard” is one that has been coined by one of my friends, Bryan, who is, like the rest of us, a reader of Mikey’s blog The Dangerous Maybe. The Mikey Standard is this: If you cannot explain it to a drunk dude on a barstool, or your coworker at the warehouse, without reverting to name-dropping or jargon, then you do not understand it.

Holding himself up to this standard for over a decade, after having studied philosophy and theory for six hours per day for over seventeen years, has made Mikey, in my opinion, the person I most want to see giving lectures — on everything, but especially those texts, thinkers, and concepts that are most difficult. But he can’t.

Mikey can’t lecture because he has to work in a warehouse to support his mom. There are a lot of personal and structural reasons that he is not currently teaching at a university. Because the internet exists and people like me are hungry for a lot more of the kind of content he has been crafting on The Dangerous Maybe and in conversations with me on my channel, I believe he can be freed from wage labor.

All it would take is $3k per month for him to quit his job.

That’s why I started his Patreon and started promoting #FreeMikey at the beginning of 2022. That is why I aim to do everything I can to continue helping him display his talent and skill to those who will benefit from it. I hope more people will do the same.

Sadly, the tendency is for people to treat Mikey like he’s just any other personality online. Like he is someone just to have on for a casual conversation — as opposed to straight up lecture-interviews, where he gets to play out the role of subject trying to know.

Well, as one who has been in continuous dialogue with him for the last seven years, I do not under-estimate him. Mikey can lecture alongside, or above, many of the most iconic lecturers of our age: Rick Roderick, Wes Cecil, Shelly Kagan, Michael Sandel, Hubert Dreyfus, and David Harvey.

What kind of Master, though?

To pre-empt the inevitable: “But we don’t need more professors, lectures, classes, books, or “content” — we need change and we need it now!”

As Slavoj said, we actually need a master. This term is not in vogue today, especially on the left. In those rare cases where a leftist advocates for a master, as is probably true of Žižek as well, the sense is for a new master signifier or perhaps a leader that could bring together various elements into a new concerted movement, i.e. another Lenin or Mao.

Fair enough, but those guys were, like every Marxist, riding on the coat-tails of a life-long research and activism project conducted primarily by Marx who was, first and foremost, a thinker benefiting from the general culture created by an already-existing working class movement and an intellectual climate raised to its highest level by Hegel.

As I argued in my Critique, Theory, and Ideology, “Hegel raised the stakes of critique to a level beyond anything anyone has ever raised it. Marx met that standard, but Lenin and Co. proceeded to lower it to Fox News lows.” While there were good enough reasons for that at the time, it is on us to bring the standard back up. The Idea of the University lives on, but little thanks to the institutions operating under that name — at least, not if we hold these institutions to the standard defended by Karl Jaspers.

In that post I also said Marxist critics of the Left like Benedict Cryptofash fail to do as Marx did. Because I brought up Cryptofash’s wonderful article on Occupying Ideology, and considering the fact that this spells out what I mean by “the standard” Marx strived to meet, I will reproduce the most relevant piece from that post:

Benedict Cryptofash thinks that he is being like Marx when he critiques the Left as being nothing more than a reification of the two-party system, and accompanying/supportive assumptions, that functions to naturalize capitalism under the guise of a progressive democracy, which is great. But this is far from all, much less what is most important, when it comes to what Marx was doing.

• Cryptofash fails to do as Marx did when he Merely critiques opposition from the supposed outside (as opposed to immanent critique, i.e. inside-out).
• Fails to advocate for a clear agenda, or at least failing to lay the groundwork for a solution by advocating for a set of working principles and goals. For Marx it was the communist movement and its strategy for building off of the existing worker’s movements inside and outside of the parliamentary system and the labor unions for a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat (that was ill defined and little more than an operating assumption at that point).
• Hides behind anonymity, something Marx vehemently opposed when he saw it advocated for by the likes of Bakunin and the anarchists who were for militant subterfuge and secret societies.12

Because Marxists, the Left, progressives, etc., have lost the plot in so many ways, it is time to go back to the drawing board, which would mean we also have to revamp our personal and community education regimens. “Immanent critique” today would not just mean between your favorite dissident factions — we have so much more work to do than anyone has acknowledged.

As Žižek has said elsewhere, we have to reverse Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: because we tried to change the world too fast last time, the point now is we need thinking.13

Only a thoroughgoing critique of everything and a revamped education regimen will develop “us” to the point where the basis is enough for a new Lenin capable of not falling into so many of the same traps, of repeating history in the worst, and most farcical, ways.

We must reverse what the chair of a local Marxist-Leninist org once told me point blank: “Marx read Hegel so that we don’t have to. Lenin read Marx so that we don’t have to. Stalin read Lenin so that we don’t have to. Mao read Stalin so that we don’t have to.” If she were being more honest, she would have then said, “and our party has written summaries with talking points to memorize, so we don’t have to think.”

Reversing this formula is not enough, either. To reverse it, we would focus our reading emphasis on Marx himself, reading him like a guru who found the philosopher’s stone. The point, for me, is to take inspiration from the attitude, approach, and practice itself: a thoroughgoing immanent critique of everything most relevant to the subject matter.

What we need now is not just someone like a Lenin or Mao to lead a Left-version of the “Capitol Siege.” Democrats want to play that up as the most dangerous attack on democracy since the Civil War, but anyone who knows anything is well aware that the levers of power do not exist in the Capitol Building. For Lenin, once the soldiers joined, they could storm the Winter Palace and hold the center of power. But today, power is not so centralized, nor are the suits who represent it for the cameras the decisive factors.

With the changes in conditions, we do not just need action that runs on old scripts — we need theory. Before a new Lenin, we need a new Marx. But only a new intellectual climate, which raises the bar back to Hegelian heights of thoroughgoing rigor, could possibly incubate such a person.

My goal is not to be Hegel or Marx. Nor Heidegger, Levinas, Deleuze, Foucault, or Baudrillard. As an aspiring thinker who must teach to learn, I consider it my calling to play some role in making a new Marx possible. We must prepare ourselves to be worthy of training up a new master in theory. Only then will a new master signifier, much less someone capable of representing it in politics without capitulating to tired old scripts and pre-determined marketing demographics, be possible.

Because the university and influencersphere “above-ground,” i.e. mainstream and alternative sources currently on offer as establishment and counter-establishment, have so drastically failed to rise to the challenge or raise the stakes, it is on us to do it ourselves, to the best of our ability, at the Theory Underground.

Support this work at https://theory-underground.com/SUPPORT

Sign up for Mikey’s course on For They Know Not What They Do at https://theory-underground.com/courses/FTKNWTD

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1 Slavoj Žižek – How to Read Lacan, p. 28

2 Starhawk – Radical Empowerment Manual: A guide for collaborative groups https://sustainabilitypopulareducation.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/the-empowerment-manual_nodrm.pdf

3 Barbara Ehrenreich – The Professional Managerial Class https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1125403552886481.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3ou1v_X7oPA5ybgwJN-W-0x4Dyj4iJIVh9j4Yvs3MuBQaHIQ7WI-3RFMs

4 The Antileftist Marx – Occupying Ideology

5 Chirstopher F. Rufo, “The State of CHAZ” June 15th, 2020 https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-chaz

6 Cornel West and Jeremy Tate – Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/19/cornel-west-howard-classics/

7 “Pelosi criticized over thanking George Floyd for ‘sacrificing your life for justice” – Savannah Behrmann https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/04/20/pelosi-thanks-george-floyd-sacrificing-your-life-justice/7310695002/

8 To really tease out what I’m getting at here would require a thoroughgoing treatment of a variety of sources, chief among these being: “Litigation Culture” by Frank Furedi, Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu, Transcending Racial Divisions: Will You Stand By Me? by Dr. Christine Louis Dit Sully, and Dr. Adolph Reed Jr.’s essay “The “Color Line” Then and Now“ in the Renewing Black Intellectual History reader to get his take on the “problems of social milieu and political-economic imperatives that are distinctive to strata within the black professional and managerial classes in the postsegregation era.”

9 Karl Jaspers – The Idea of the University. Jaspers follows up this characterization by saying that this is a mere appearance because if it was truly what had become of the university, then the university would cease to exist. I think, at this point, he would probably think it has indeed ceased to exist.

10 Jo Freeman – The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Written version: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Audio version:

11 Ibid (“same as above”).

12 Post Pleeb – Critique, Theory, and Ideology

13 Slavoj Žižek – Don’t Act. Just Think.