Bystanders Kill Meaningful Moments
- Zoom calls with passive bystanders kill meaningful moments and exchanges.
- Active participation is essential to uphold the quality and tension of a conversation space.
The Challenge of Meaning Making
- Meaning making in language is an active process of selecting signifiers in a fragmented linguistic landscape.
- Language evolves and fracturing society leads to mutual unintelligibility across different groups.
Beyond Identity Politics for Change
- Autodidact workers and activists must move beyond identity politics and superficial discourse.
- Large scale change needs genuine understanding of social conditions and productive conversation.
If you're serious about doing theory, making art, changing the world, or living well, we invite you to join us. https://theoryunderground.com/subscribe
Theory Underground exists to cultivate the conditions necessary for a working class intellectual renaissance that goes beyond old political categories or other identitarian niches. At TU, autodidact workers with earbuds and professionals who see no future in existing institutions or movements are able to challenge their doxa and develop an understanding of the situation we are in. The aim of this work is to change the coordinates of thought, action, and organizing in American culture, so as to make possible large scale structural change for the sake of timenergy for all.
If you subscribe at https://theoryunderground.com/subscribe you'll get access to a package of courses, including:
12 Core Concepts with social theorist David McKerracher
The Fault-Line Theory with philosopher Michael Downs
12 Essential Political Theorists with political theorist Benjamin Studebaker
The Philosophy of Nature with philosopher Nina Power
The way these all get woven together at a deeper and more meta level is through the ongoing research seminars led by David McKerracher, Benjamin Studebaker, and Michael Downs, where they engage with one another’s work by sharing developments from their own perspectives, theory, and research.
If you subscribe at higher levels and support our work, we'll support your development with bespoke teaching. Alone and unaided, we struggle to grasp our situation in its fullness and formulate a meaningful response. By working together and pooling our energies, we can do better. Join us at theoryunderground.com/subscribe
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ABOUT / GET INVOLVED
Looking to accelerate your way into a fresh understanding of our current situation? That’s what Theory Underground is all about. We are a seminar, lecture, and book publishing organism for workers with earbuds and professionals who see no hope in existing institutions. We're here to lay the conditions for doing theory and making art and having a life worth living in the 21st Century. If you don't know what it is already, then good luck! We're sure you'll figure it out if you're worth having around. In the meantime, enjoy this free content, all thanks to our patrons. You can always fund the free content at Patreon, but if you want to get involved at TU, then check out the membership tiers. And don't ask questions or make requests or give us advice, please. Take it or leave it. We guarantee our product meets a quality assurance check that none of your other content is capable of achieving, but you won't be able to tell the difference for a while. What we are rolling out in 2025 is a series of courses and ongoing seminars. Base subscribers at TU get access to the most essential of all that. The three tiers of membership grant certain very special privileges, most of which are not on the menu but you'll find out about. What IS on the menu though, for 2025, is a course on The Philosophy of Nature by Nina Power, 12 Essential Political Theorists with Benjamin Studebaker, The Fault-Line Theory with Michael Downs, and what I, the author of this copy, founder of this org, and main labor force for everything (production, socials, business, research, teaching, I'm a busy guy, guys) am coming out with a special series of Public seminars and Private seminars, as well as special introductory and deep dive courses. Never mind wading through the last two years of content. I'm here to be your tour guide through the most essential problems, concepts, and questions at Theory Underground. We're going to be talking about the method we've been developing between dialectics, phenomenology, and socioanalysis, in dialogue with Marxism, psychoanalysis, and French fried German theory (the fun pomo shit). Anyway, if you want to access all of that you better just subscribe right now: https://theoryunderground.com/subscribe
MUSIC CREDITS Logo sequence music by https://olliebeanz.com/music https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode Mike Chino, Demigods https://youtu.be/M6wruxDngOk
TU owns the rights to use the “What's Left” theme, thanks to its creator, Adam Leher. Thanks!