Welcome Theory Underground – “Theory Pleeb” is no more

Not all mistakes are failures, but mistakes that are not learned from? Those are. I’m going to talk about two of mine.

When accessing this from your phone or browser, you should get a suggestion for “push notifications.” If you allow these, then you will be notified for future posts, which is more reliable than anything else for keeping up with this work from now on.

You might be here because you saw that my YouTube account has no more public videos. Many of my best videos are still available from the front page of my channel, where they are displayed in playlists, but the rest is gone. Poof!

Now that I have your attention, welcome.

I’ve decided to start failing and flailing in public on purpose, but I promise it will be done with no apologetic pleas for your sympathy. We can just laugh at the disaster, and then learn.

I’m not going to enumerate a list of my failures here, now, though that would be fun and enlightening I’m sure. Anyone who has been paying attention for very long knows of many.

“Failure” is, some will say, in some sense subjective, or relative. Obviously true, especially considering that a failure can be understood as nothing more than a lesson that is still being made sense of. With that said though, a failure that is not acknowledged easily escapes interpretive-integration into some kind of instructive lesson.

I’m going to proceed, then, to use a technical distinction between “mistake” and “failure.” Mistakes are things you tried out under certain assumptions that proved to be wrong. They only become failures when you fail to interpret and integrate. Counseling, therapy, or psychoanalytic sessions can help with the work of interpretation and integration, but alternating between writing for oneself and others is also crucial.

Mistakes are, then, the precondition of what I’m calling failures as well as lessons. By writing about mistakes I can begin to interpret, which is to say, understand, and only through doing so will anything be learned or made “a lesson.”

Personal mistakes and political mistakes are supposedly the same thing, if we go with “the personal is political.” In some senses this is the case and in others it is not, but in my case, there’s quite a lot of both.

To turn those mistakes into lessons is something good for me, because it will help me develop a sense of priority and principle, i.e. maturity. I’ve been through the shit and now my priorities and principles are informed by the visceral and embodied will to not repeat. You might not have the same experiences (much less traumas) driving you, but you can still learn from others and then choose to take some lesson to heart that hopefully helps you avoid analogous failures in your own life.

To keep this post nice and short I will just give two examples of political and personal mistakes in my life that are being turned into useful lessons. I’ll show how those lessons inform my practice, i.e. priorities and principles of daily action.

Two Mistakes: New Symbolization Publishing and My Branded Existence Online.

I started an L.L.C. for New Symbolization Publishing towards the end of 2021. I did not do this with the intention of starting a publishing company, but to merely get a little liability security (???) and a tax write-off. According to the recommendation of some YouTube videos on self-publishing this is the best way to go about it.

When I finally got to hold the first copy of Waypoint in my hands though, that’s when I realized how special this technology really is. Amazon might be bad in a lot of ways, but as I am arguing elsewhere, there are miraculous capabilities made possible by this platform. Being able to self-publish anything I write is not just good because it means I can “cut out the middle man.” I have nothing against the middle man.

Self-publishing is not just about selling books or making a name for yourself. To merely hold your own book does something psychological to you. I can’t describe it, but my friend who pushed me so hard to self-publish this knew it would change me. Holding a book you wrote has an impact even if you did not go through a publisher.

Because I have done it, now I know I can do it again. I am the kind of person who writes books. This is now a fact. Whether they are good or not is another question altogether, but regardless of your thoughts on Waypoint, everyone will readily agree that practice makes perfect. Or good enough. If I ain’t there yet, just wait.

So what does this have to do with my great mistake regarding New Symbolization Publishing? I said I would try to keep this short, so I’ll just spit it out: I bit off way more than I could chew! The goal was not to publish anyone other than myself, but then I wanted Mikey to feel some of his writing in his own hands. I paid my friend Adam to make a couple of beautiful covers and then I put a two collections of published and unpublished works Mikey has shared with me into two books and sent them to him. He had no idea those were coming in the mail, and when he got them, he was blown away!

He was no longer interested in publishing with a “real” publisher because he now saw that he could skip all the hassles of red tape and the back and forth with the publisher, editor, and potentially more intermediaries. I said I have nothing against the middle man, but one of the cons of the more traditional route? Longer turn-around times before you ever get to hold your first book. Mikey wanted to short-circuit the process.

Because I already had New Symbolization Publishing registered as an L.L.C., I thought oh what the hell, why not? The two of us can publish whatever we want to get out faster this way. If we have something ready, it can be available a month later. (Considering the fact that I just wrote the main manuscript to my second book in 48 hours, this opens up a lot of possibilities!)

Mikey made a public post about the books I had sent him (shown above). He was so excited. I was so excited. Suddenly I was like, to my (now) fiancée, “We should publish something by you!” Probably ten other people in my life at the time could attest to having been told something similar.

People react in all kinds of ways at the thought of being published. Put a bunch of things someone has written into a PDF and send that to its author, no problem… upload that same PDF to Amazon KDP and send them a book version with the table of contents there at the beginning? Horror!

Dread, anxiety, and other big moods resulting in a loss for words, or feelings of tremendous gratitude, were all responses to the simple offer, “Wanna publish something!?”

With some friends I kicked around the idea of taking no cut whatsoever, just uploading it as a favor for them and they could get whatever is left after Amazon takes its cut. With other friends who had bigger plans and wanted to cut me in as a part of paying for an actual service? We talked a bit about various ways of doing it. Nothing too serious though, especially considering the fact that I mainly just wanted people to get to hold their own thoughts in their hand the way I had gotten to with Waypoint.

This part of me just wants to demystify “books” so that people realize anyone can make one. I don’t just mean “now” in the sense that it is easy to do, either. I mean anyone can write a book if they just keep working their thoughts out over the years. (Read endnote 1 for a clarification on “demystifying”)

You don’t have to articulate yourself for a publisher, editor, or imagined audience; you don’t have to prove that your ideas will sell. If selling is not even the goal, then this is good news indeed.

Money exists though, which means that things are complicated. Whether I took some small percentage or none at all, I wanted to keep the money side as uncomplicated as possible. But because I had not yet spent any time with a lawyer to figure out how to go about things, everything stayed at the purely speculative level.

New Symbolization Publishing released my book at the end of 2021 and has done nothing since January of 2022. I created a Substack for NSP, and another for NS-Pleeb. I updated the NSP Substack a couple of times, but then fell off of it, though I continued to publish with NS-Pleeb.

Nobody ever bothered to ask: What’s going on here? Either nobody cares, or they’re all too polite to ask. My guess is mostly the former. You see, most of my audience for a few years was video-based. It’s hard to get an audience to change medium. More likely you will have to basically start over from scratch when doing so.

What that tells me is that there is hardly any such thing as “an audience” to speak of, if that “audience” is really reducible to a specific media form that is not writing. OR, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, I don’t really care about an audience that doesn’t care to read my thoughts.

Of course I want to still make video content, just not for an audience that does not read. Thankfully I learned firsthand though that there are plenty of people on YouTube who will listen to something I write if it is played by a robot-reader. Being physically busy all the time and therefore having little time to sit and read, I’m the same way.

Ideally I could publish all of my writings in book, blog, podcast, audiobook, and video formats, to make it easier for everyone regardless of medium-preference. With the limitations of working a full-time wage labor job at Amazon, I not only was unable to do a lot of the publishing work I had planned, I also had legitimate inhibitions.

One author who achieved relative fame in various circles I somewhat overlap with expressed interest in publishing with New Symbolization Publishing. All of a sudden I had way more to think about. Publishing some friends is one thing, but a big name author?

This author gave me a lot of insight into the publishing industry and played the role of a mentor for a couple of weeks. One thing he said really stuck with me: “You can keep failing in public, or you can take a step back for a few months and then come back with a big announcement that rolls out the plan for the first six books you’re going to publish.”

Not only does such an approach work to better build hype, it also gives the chance to organize various book-launch events.

Having organized a conference and discussion groups for almost a decade, I knew this kind of approach made more sense. Even if the books were only meant for smaller readerships, they would still benefit from getting posted online ahead of time, having a cover-reveal event, and then some kind of IRL or online book-launch attended by supporters.

Even if we can publish books a month from their initial writing, it helps to wet peoples’ appetites and build a little bit of hype ahead of time. So I stepped back from the NSP side of things, at least publicly, and thought hard about what kind of plan to develop and then roll out.

But nothing ever works out the way you plan. If all had gone according to plan in the spring of 2022, then by fall of 2022 I would have been inside of a teaching and production studio space that I was building with funds and materials supplied by the host of the property where I was living at the time. With that teaching and production studio space built, I would have then set to work on building a website to home lecture course modules, video essays, and documentaries I’ve been planning.

Instead, the property situation was compromised. My wonderful hosts had a crisis that made it so the studio could not be finished. Ever since then my plans have been up in the air and things have been shifting around as my plans adjust to the loss of the studio.

All of this is the reason why I did not roll out a publishing schedule for New Symbolization Publishing during Fall of 2022. But that is not the “failure” I think instructive for a lesson concerning my choices in the last year and a half regarding NSP. No, that was all just context. The issue was that “NSP,” as a concept, got ahead of itself.

Not the publishing, just NSP. “New Symbolization” is coined by Alain Badiou in his book The True Life. But what the idea of New Symbolization has become, to me, is something somewhat different from what he intends to signify by this term.

Badiou says that “We need a new symbolization.” He specifically advocates for an egalitarian one. What he has in mind, though, is communism. For Badiou, “communism” counts as something that would be “New.” He would say that the U.S.S.R. and Chinese Communist Party are not examples of “actually existing communism” but were, instead, flawed (though instructive and inspiring) examples of failed attempts to build the New Symbolization.

I personally do not think the signifier “communism” is going to cut it. Of course, many of my friends who consider themselves leftists of one kind or another (anarchist, Marxist, etc.) would agree with me, considering the terms “socialism” and “communism” to be too cluttered by historical connotations at this point. Such friends say we need a new signifier that does not subconsciously trigger connotations of bread-lines, purges, show trials, forced labor, and decades of protracted mass terror and unending civil war.

I agree, but I don’t think it is the mere signifier that triggers those associations. The signifier’s signified itself, the concept regardless of what you name it, still aims at a “post-capitalist, egalitarian, classless society.” The more thought I’ve put into it, the more problematic it has become.

It would be nice to, right now, launch into the reasons why the term “communism” is problematic at the level its signified, not just the signifier. I’ll restrain myself and give you a raincheck for another time. For now, the fact that the signifier alone is problematic is cause enough to re-think things, for reasons that go beyond problems inherent to the supposed phenomenal content or designation of necessary conditions such as “classless” or “egalitarian” and the frameworks those are dependent upon or reify.

“I don’t know if a new symbolization is possible,” a socialist friend told me after he had read Waypoint. Because I don’t get too it into there beyond a few hints and the publisher statement, and because we hadn’t gotten too deep into that in our own conversations, there is the possibility that he and I mean different things by this term. He either means that when he sees the words “new symbolization” he thinks of some crypto-communism, which he sees as impossible, or else he understands that a new symbolization, for me, means something more radical than communism.

No communist I have met feels the need to do one third of the work I feel that must be done before a new symbolization is possible. Maybe one hundredth, even. Before getting into why that is, let’s consider the NSP mission statement itself, which raised the stakes way too high, way too soon.

The New Symbolization Publisher Statement

What We Mean By “Symbolization,” and why we are only just getting ready to get started. 

Symbolization arranges and orders society, human subjectivity, and our sense of the world. Symbolization is usually less something we do on purpose than something that is done to us as we are subjectivized within this societal order.

Symbolization includes the presuppositional frameworks, practical models, scientific understanding, unconscious dynamics, and matrices of intelligibility that subtend, reify, and inform our practical and theoretical efforts. Symbolization frames and assigns meaning, but more importantly, it is the conductor of habitus, the directives programmed by das Man, by the big Other, and by a social order in which our time-energy and desire are subjected to domination in the forms of perpetual servitude to malicious masters and faceless institutions, self-enslavement, and ideology. 

As subjects of ideology who seek liberation, as workers who seek time-energy outside of work, and as researchers who want to start thinking outside of the confines of specialized and highly controlled institutions, New Symbolization is both a process and goal. It means acquiring the conceptual means necessary for personal and collective liberation.

To even begin, we need both philosophy and theory, the history of ideas and the critique of history. Such a process/goal is itself a way of being in the world that will require continual familiarization with, and critique of, everything–science, art, languages, the social sciences–but not just willy-nilly, eclectic, or curiously detached, no! The vision is to experiment with methodology and the sometimes-systematic application of different concepts, lenses, frames, and lines of interrogation.

Our interests take us “everywhere” but we are mapping the contours of desire, ideology, and subjectivity in the process. As this develops, we will gain a new perspective, but not just any perspective.

Having a perspective without philosophy and theory is pure ideology. The perspective(s) that will develop and proliferate from New Symbolization are only just the beginning of what’s ultimately necessary for what we are called to do.

These are just footholds on the journey, marks along the path, messages to fellow travelers and collaborators. If you are just a tourist who does not seek to go deeper and break from the ruts everyone is in, if you just want it easy, to take the beaten path, then this is probably not for you. But if you are trying to think and act in ways that will break beyond the confines of systemic stultification, psychological gerrymandering, and ideology, then welcome!

We’ve got work to do.

Found at the back of Waypoint as well as on the NSP substack at: https://nspublishing.substack.com/p/new-symbolization-publishing

That’s a lot, right? A tall order indeed. I mean, this is like starting a coffee shop whose motto is to save the world, except worse. The bar is raised so high by this statement that almost all creative intellectual projects that could be published under such a vision are cast under a kind of scrutiny that could very well inhibit the intellectual and creative work that must first be done if we are to ever seriously participate in purposeful and strategic action that positively and radically changes the “presuppositional frameworks, practical models, scientific understanding, unconscious dynamics, and matrices of intelligibility that subtend, reify, and inform our practical and theoretical efforts.”

As far as I can tell, “communism” as a solution is certainly a part of the existing presuppositional frameworks. On the one side people think it is inevitable and desirable in the long run, and others think that it is inevitable but not desirable. There are of course a great deal more people who don’t think much of communism, it tending to only really function in the popular imaginary for conservatives and leftists, while liberals and progressives rarely take it too seriously as a threat (at least not in the U.S.).

Point being, insofar as “capitalism” exists at the ideological level for people (though it likes to hide behind other master signifiers such as “GDP,” “the economy,” “regulation,” “jobs,” “inflation,” etc.) the word and meaning of the ideological term “capitalism” is dialectically dependent on the signifier “communism.”

Whether “communism” stands for a hope, threat, or impossibility, is dependent on the master signifier operative for the person whose common sense is being quilted. For example, for a communist the signifier “communism” represents a hope and promise, potentially even as a plan that guides action. For the capitalist the signifier “communism” represents a threat.

This works the other way too, of course, since these are semiotic and dialectical relations. The opposite term, “capitalism” signifies The Problem for a communist and The Hope or Ideal for the capitalist.

This is all very elementary, but I wanted to be painstakingly clear for the point to come.

“Communism” is dialectically and semiotically dependent on its opposite. This is not just at the level of signs or pure signifiers, because there is no such thing. Signifiers do not exist outside of brains who have hearts, limbic systems, and animal reflections. The signifiers “capitalism” and “communism” are burdened by the feelings they provoke, but these are not the mere feelings of ideology that could be corrected by merely “showing reality” by “speaking truth.”

The signifiers dictate and dominate the analysis. We don’t want to get caught in a hermetic debate over the various good and bad conceptions of these terms that rely on one another and have a whole lot of human-history baggage. More importantly, if we want to be properly scientific, we cannot prioritize conceptual analysis over phenomenological investigation.

The aim of phenomenology is to, as Husserl said, get “back to the things themselves!” The words are stand-ins for things, but they can become unanchored from reality. Take a few decent insights converted into concepts and you can build an entire system that ends up having nothing to do with this world outside of the convenience or enjoyment it affords its subjects.

Granted, dialectics, from Plato to Marx, aims to move with the things themselves, never to become unanchored from reality. Idealist dialectics most obviously falls prey to taking any deviations in reality that break with the ideal forms as proof that this world is simply fallen. The goal of Marx’s dialectical approach was to break from this problem by basing itself in concrete reality.

Whether Marx ever lived up to that goal or not is one question, but to assume that those who enshrined his attempt as the Gospel, the one complete truth, the iron clad scientific laws of the universe? No quarter shall be granted here my friends.

If Marx were born today he would not be a Marxist. He famously wasn’t even in his own day. Instead of reading Smith, Mill, and Ricardo for political economy, Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach for his German Idealism, and Rousseau, Bakunin, and Proudhon for his anarcho-socialism, he would today be reading the mainstream and heterodox tendencies in sociology, anthropology, economics, philosophy, critical theory, phenomenology, structuralism, post structuralism, philosophy of science, media theory, and especially histories of the last few hundred years. To repeat, this would not just be done within the framework of left to right, a framework he saw as a bourgeois mystification.

Not only has no Marxist today done this, but if such a person existed, it would still be beyond that person’s capacities to birth a new symbolization from will and brain power, personal experience, and education. These would be a part of it, but no single person could do this work, nor could a single person capable of such an undertaking find much of an audience today.

Marx was writing to the most literate public that could ever be achieved at that mass. Literacy rates have not only declined since then, but more importantly, all of the fields just mentioned have become increasingly specialized and isolated from one another, while the educational standards at the universities decrease and the volume of bullshit papers increases.

An author today is going to get so much shit for merely using a word like “essence” or “totality.” A professor gave me a hard time once for using the word “adumbrate” (correctly) in a sentence. It is as though people who want to know things are too limit their vocabulary until practicing for the G.R.E. or other graduate level exams, at which time hundreds of these “pretentious” and “antiquated” words have to be memorized quickly and then forgotten.

This is why I said that I am not writing to the public. At the beginning of Waypoint I struggled over the concept of trying to write to the working class vs. writing to figure one’s thoughts out. Insisting any working class intellectual needs an opportunity to do the latter, I can put off trying to reach a broad audience. I am merely preparing myself to write to people who have not even been born.

I said I would give myself five years to write for myself and my fellow travelers, just to get things figured out, before attempting to write to the parents of the people I ultimately aim to write to. If my ultimate audience is people who will be people who are twenty-five in thirty years, then theirs are the parents I will write to in five.

(I said that a year ago so I guess it’s four years now until I write that book. Though I did just happen to, on a whim, write a book to people who could very well end up being parents in wonderful relationships in the years to come, but more on that later.)

Anyway, feeling the need to write out my “takes” on why no existing ideology or movement gets it right, much less to roll out some purported solution, was never a part of the intention with that New Symbolization Publishing mission statement. The work that must be done, or that I feel called to do, is the kind of thing that merely lays the groundwork, and develops the tools, for those who will put our hard work into strategic and deliberate practice.

I want to understand, and so I teach, but in teaching, I develop myself not for the existing world, but for one to come in the faces of those who are not even here yet. But even though this was the plan revealed at the beginning of Waypoint, I nevertheless felt the need to write that kind of a work sooner because of the questions raised by the mission statement.

The mission statement also spoke of “we” a lot without ever specifying who is meant by the collective pronoun. I was using this “we” the way Nietzsche did, not a specific group, but philosophers of the future. Well, activists and philosophers alike need inter-generational dialogue, instruction, and resources. I write to the ones who are to come, because by holding myself to a higher standard, I know I will be forced to work harder to understand and make philosophy and theory accessible.

“Theory Underground” lowers the standard in a way that will free my intellectual and creative energies. Like Mikey, I do underground theory, but the name of my stuff is going to be Theory Underground because Theory Pleeb decided to do something more unconventional than planned, which gets me to the other mistake.

My attempt to exist online, under a variety of nicknames and pseudonyms, has been rife with complications and rich in lessons. Avatars and personas have a strange power over me. “Theory Pleeb” made things really complicated. Sometimes this was a part I was playing, whereas other times it was pretty much a genuine part of me playing out. Those two things are not the same. Different avatars and different names bring out different parts of a person as they are articulated into an intelligible persona.

Let’s just say I read and found incredibly relatable the book Dead Celebrities, Living Icons, which uses McLuhanite media theory and Jungian symbolism and archetype psychology to talk about how “celebrity” in the age of television gave rise to an unprecedented new dynamic that can be lethal to the subjects of its spotlight.

Having your visage and persona spread about a society and interpreted by strangers who have nothing really to do with you, or who might latch onto you in unhinged or ridiculous ways, brings out a part of oneself that puts you at odds with yourself.

I heard an artist on a podcast (trying to find it) say she avoids using pseudonyms because it blurs the lines too much. You have to just be yourself.

“Be yourself” is problematic for anyone who has ever thoroughly deconstructed authenticity (2). Especially when you are a filthy postmodernist, or at least influenced by so many of them.

It’s not just the nickname or persona or whatever though, because the bigger issue is in using that pseudonym as the brand of the work I’m doing. I will still be referred to as “Theory” and “Pleeb” by friends or fellow travelers who have already taken to using these, which I love. But I am David McKerracher, and my friends call me Dave.

Even then though, I am not titling my website “davidmckerracher.com” Theory, Pleeb, and Dave are something you can call me if you’re cool. David McKerracher is just my proper name. “Theory Underground” is not a name of a person, much less a pseudonym.

“Theory Underground” is a double entendre in that it means both that Theory Pleeb has gone underground, but also that David McKerracher works from, is for, or is doing underground theory. Underground theory is by and for people who do not think philosophy and theory should be limited to academia or PMC roles in society, who are not trying to be “influencers” so much as thinkers, theorists, and life-long students, and who keep centered in their work those who are, as opposed to the instrumentalized prerogatives of careerists, seeking to understand for its own sake (3).

So, welcome to the Theory Underground!

What kind of intellectual and creative works can you expect to see published under this signifier? Will they all instrumentally serve “New Symbolization” or might there be less-instrumentalized works to come?

We’ll see. I’m feeling it out. For now I am just going to do what’s right. As it has come together over the last few months though, I can tell you there is a lot to be excited about if you care about any of the stuff I’ve done before. For what is coming is a way of integrating and systematically developing things that have until now only existed in the germ form.

If you are early to this, then lucky you. Not a lot of people will know about it until it has been built. If you’re here to see the beginning, then you won’t just have fun or find it interesting, no, you’re going to learn a lot. I’m going to learn a lot. We’re all going to learn like nobody has ever learned. We’re developing new ways of learning.

A decade’s worth of intense study and labor is about to crystallize into something you’ll wanna tell your kids about.

End.

My next two posts will be about what I am first going to do with this website and how you can help.

Endnote 1. If you are concerned that “demystifying books” would make it so that ever-more trash gets published, then I hate to break it to you but we’re already there. I cannot even begin to get into how much trash is being added to the book market every day, but suffice it to say that a new “work from home” model includes paying ghost writers to fabricate short works on whatever is trending at the moment. If this horrifies you, good, but be advised, it is hardly any worse than what the publishing industry has already been doing for decades. The point to demystifying books is not so that you see them as worthless or think that anything you yourself are to write is now on par with a great work of philosophy or literature. The point is that you can see through “the book” and realize most books are basically blog posts anyway. The next step is learning to tell the difference between a work of quality and something that is a fabricated response to what the algorithms or social big Other supposedly wants, as opposed to a singularly beautiful, profound, or re-readable work that is birthed from sacrifice, hardship, and necessity.

Endnote 2: Reading Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity should suffice, though I don’t think his critique misses the mark if it is attempting a genuine intervention into Heideggerian phenomenology, as some take it to be.

Endnote 3: I will argue elsewhere that there is no hope of changing the world without theory that is done for its own sake. Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach misunderstands the nature and role of interpretation. First, for the reason given by Slavoj Žižek when he says we must reverse the 11th Thesis because, in the 20th Century “we tried to change the world too quickly,” so now the point is to interpret again. Second, because pure theory, as opposed to instrumentalized rationalization, is a good in-itself that tends to produce useful results that are always appropriated later for instrumental purposes. The relation between theory and practice is never one-directional, both inform one another, but because there has been such an emphasis on the latter, there must be a concerted effort to reassess and understand.