Symbolic Heroism vs. Addiction | Death Drive and Jouissance in Underground Music
Part 2 of the Introduction to Underground Theory, by David McKerracher - $UICIDEBOY$ (Suicide Boys), Mitch Lucker of Suicide Silence, GG Allin, and JUICE WRLD
This is a continuation from pt. 1, which you can read for free here.
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.[i]
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.”[ii] 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.[iii]
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.
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This post was an excerpt from Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You. Enjoy it serially here for free. Each part of The Introduction (by David McKerracher) will be published over the next of the Theory Underground tour in Europe (photo below). If you prefer a physical copy, orders within the U.S. can get it at a discount here. Otherwise, I recommend getting it from Amazon. Also, stay tuned for the Audible version of this - in production now!
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Author bio:
David McKerracher (M.A.) is the organizer for, and founder of, Theory Underground, a teaching, research, and publishing platform by and for dropout workers with earbuds and burnt out post-grads who want to understand The Situation as a means towards figuring out the conditions of possibility for The Good Life. McKerracher’s background is in critical theory, political philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology. All of McKerracher's work revolves around a single question: What is the Good Life? McKerracher's questioning into the conditions of possibility for living The Good Life led him to an M.A. thesis on “Timenergy, the existential basis of labor power.” This work draws heavily from Marx and Heidegger. McKerracher developed this concept further in his first book called Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Social Change, and his second book simply titled Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Because “Timenergy Theory” requires a more robust theory of libidinal economy and ideology, McKerracher has spent the last few years learning Žižekian and Lacanian theory of ideology from his compatriot Michael Downs. Theory Underground is McKerracher’s vehicle for cultivating the kind of research and conservation necessary to take this project to the next level, the long-term goal of which is to overcome the current culture war deadlocks by inquiry into their conditions of possibility. The goal of this work is to pave a way forward for humanity to maintain the conditions of a robust cultural plurality, harness automation-for-all, and ultimately, explore the universe.
[i] Mikey’s piece called “A Review of Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire” goes into this with a lot of great examples: https://thedangerousmaybe.medium.com/a-review-of-todd-mcgowans-capitalism-and-desire-da2c56290e5e?fbclid=IwAR1NPipiPTu-ZR5Jz5UE16yojwPQmLgCVMi2fW8sQiY6C14-wwQ7IDZU22w This should not be read as a review so much as an actual expansion pack on McGowan’s amazing work
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