The "Underground" Is Nothing To Glorify.
Part 1 of the Introduction to Underground Theory, by David McKerracher - $UICIDEBOY$ (Suicide Boys), Mitch Lucker of Suicide Silence, GG Allin, and JUICE WRLD
This is the sentence that opens the book. It was supposed to be something special, but sometimes you just need to get straight into things. What things? Well, first of all, let’s clear up any confusion: “Underground Theory” is the name of this book, but “Theory Underground” is the name of a critical media theory experiment that is a theory lecture course and publishing platform. It’s my baby. I consider it an opportunity to hone my own abilities, experiment with new media forms, and collaborate with colleagues, friends and fellow travelers in the world of underground theory.
The goal of Theory Underground is to develop educational content for, and connect with, people who see no future in what is on offer today, but who nonetheless want to raise the bar that has been lowered by academic institutions who serve profit and the pursuit of career advancement as their ultimate end.
“Theory Underground” takes some inspiration from the history of underground music, which emerges from rich contexts of artists experimenting with new media forms in an attempt to better express their moment. They break away from the suffocating and stultifying mainstream to do what they love regardless of the cost.
Underground theorists do similarly, in experimenting with new media forms and modes of organizing so as to revolutionize understanding in the fields of knowledge. This can be good and bad, because a lot of self-styled gurus and charlatans necessarily emerge from the influencersphere.
Many who leave academia end up abandoning standards and legitimacy altogether. One can leave academia to try to save oneself but nonetheless sellout to the attention economy’s algorithms. Giving in to market pressures results in a loss of purpose and integrity. One of the goals of Theory Underground is to counter the worst tendencies of the attention economy. Theory Underground aims to raise the standards on ourselves, so that we can rise to genuine challenges that were only feigned at our overly administered universities.
What lies beneath the ground?
The word “underground” has many connotations: Adventure, danger, marginalization, and creation. Though it has always been the case that those who are burnt out with, or see no future in, “the above ground” flock to the underground as an exciting and edgy reprieve from the repressive expectations, obligations, and law of society, the underground is not something to glorify uncritically. Its negative connotations include abandonment, exile, crime, addiction, and violence.
Light and darkness are interdependent, but civilization has lifted light to the level of True and Good, repressing everything associated with darkness to the level of evil. The Nietzschean, Bataillean, Landian, punk, hardcore, and rap tendencies are to take “tarrying with the negative” to its hyperbolic limit. GG Allin is the archetype of this limit: the punk “rock star” known for beating the shit out of fans, raping audience members on stage, and throwing his excrement everywhere.
Everywhere an underground scene opens up, the social superego will infiltrate, a new order will get erected, and then from those conditions will arise the likes of a Nick Land or GG Allin who take transgression to a point that breaks the pretense and exposes the “posers” for what they are: tourists and lifestyle consumers.
For those unfamiliar with Nick Land’s notorious transgressive style, this is the kind of thing he was writing in his ostensibly leftist days:
Christ screams on the cross: ‘Father, your parsimony disgusts me, is this a death?’ He thinks of the abortion he missed, lying wrapped in bloody rags on the floor of a cheap hostelry. He is excited by the thought of his mother in mortal sin, and of a harsher love than he ever knew. How was it possible for her to forgo the delight of hacking God’s fruit from her womb? (That was a chance for religion.) ‘for, behold, the days are coming in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck’ [John XXIII:29].[i]
Pretty edgy, yeah? This is why I see Land as the GG Allin of theory.
Proximity to filth, crust, disease, and cruelty thus gets raised to the level of social and cultural capital: upward mobility in transgressive counterculture circles can thus commodify the signifiers of self harm, ritual abuse, and gore for its own sake. If one’s “transgression” is really just wrapped up in the jouissance of shocking the sensibilities of polite society, then its thirst for annihilation will go far beyond blasphemy in more traditional senses, which is why Land moved on to greener pastures of shock, coining the term “neo reactionary dark enlightenment” and dabbling in “race realism.”
Edginess feels real when nothing else does. The domesticated suburbanite animal of middle class America, caged by a schooling system that reduces its vital timenergy to instrumentalized labor power, which qualifies that labor power on the basis of how well the subject succeeds or fails in having its libidinal economy incorporated into the structure of rewards and punishments, screams out for something, anything, Real.
Real is that which cannot be incorporated into the sanitized, structured, ordered and beautiful world of appearances, perceptions, and commodity relations. The Real is the realm of trauma—as GG Allin says, “I am the real!”
Rape, genocide, serial killers, and addiction thus get raised to the level of idols by countercultural consumer fandoms. Those disenchanted with their privilege and the fakeness of the world watch American Psycho, Clockwork Orange, and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom on repeat. Is this “real shit”?
How about videos of Mexican cartels peeling the faces off of its torture victims? What about ISIS beheadings? Don’t forget Faces of Death. Underground shit always has these niche corners of fascination with the worst aspects of human nature. Everything we are not allowed to talk about wants to come out to play. The underground is opened by those who feel a roiling madness at the hypocrisy of the hyper-sanitized and over-produced corporate middle class illusion. Whatever spits in the face of all that and says, “You’re actually no better than the filth you repress by force” has potential to get lifted to the level of an underground idol.
It is not rare to find suicide getting glorified too in the underground. Is it because so many involved have already gone through a sort of symbolic suicide that got them shut out of the mainstream in the first place? Is it because of what Sean Mittelstaedt calls “future trauma” (in this volume)?
It’s also because suicide is the place where absolute self-possession, freedom, and transgression of morality and law all meet in a singular act that cannot be exchanged. This is why Baudrillard thought seriously about its radical potential to counter capital.
GG Allin promised to kill himself on stage as the grand culmination of his project, which would have been the most extreme manifestation of his autonomy, but instead, he died from overdose, a slave to his appetites.
The $UICIDEBOY$ made a suicide pact that, if they did not “make it” in the hardcore-rap underground, then they would both kill themselves. Though they “made it,” they have nonetheless had to struggle with being possessed by drug addiction, feeling like they lose control:
Popping oxy
Snorting roxy
Body feeling like a zombie
Never been a role model
Never hear me say I’m sorry …
I’ve been suicidal with them drugs up in my mama’s womb
All these poppies
Cock the shotty
Barrell pressed against my body[ii]
To have the barrel pressed against your body because you have lost control to drugs and fame is not the same kind of “suicidal” as the being-towards-death that makes a suicide pact as a radical act of autonomy and rejection of the status quo. But these two kinds of suicidal ideation get mixed up in the underground.
Suicide from misery and loss of control is not equivalent to choosing when and how to exit. This is the contradiction within which mumble and Sound Cloud rappers find themselves today: drugs as escape, but escape as loss of control. Being honest about this contradiction and tarrying with it to the best of one’s ability has become the key to success and early death, as with Juice WRLD who, like Lil Peep, was well aware of what was coming:
If it wasn’t for the pills, I wouldn’t be here
But if I keep taking these pills, I won’t be here, yeah[iii]
Mitch Luker of deathcore band Suicide Silence is another example. He lived on the edge and made himself a sacrifice for all the millions of teenagers who he felt needed to hear his message: It’s ok to be angry, it’s ok to throw a fit, it’s ok to freak out. “People feel so much pent up anger, they just need something to happen. When they hear my music, it triggers something and you never know what’s going to happen. You might punch someone in the face. You might…”[iv]
One of Suicide Silence’s most famous songs is about suicide. “No Pity for a Coward” has two major interpretations: Either it tells people who make fun of suicidal people to just kill themselves, or it tells people who say they are suicidal but don’t go through with it to just go through with it. As the famous line goes:
Seconds from the end
What’s it gonna be
Pull the trigger bitch
Why is this empowering? Because
Fuck your past
Your future
Is in your hands[v]
Suicide is suggested as radical autonomy: don’t be a coward, if you need to get out of this life, then get it over with—but if you are going to live, then the future is in your hands. But the contradiction in play here, between 1) a radically transgressive and empowering act vs. 2) being enslaved to one’s addictions or self-negating habits, manifests itself perfectly in Mitch Lucker’s tragic story.
Everything he did, all of the relentless touring, writing, and recording, was done for his daughter.[vi] But his wife couldn’t stop him from jumping on that motorcycle on the night of November 1st, 2012. If his family truly came first, and the mental health of his fans second, then what role did riding his motorcycle while sloppy drunk play?
Lucker lost control of his black 2013 Harley-Davidson in Huntington Beach at 8:55 p.m. on Halloween night and slammed into a Main Street light pole, police said in a news release. He died Thursday at University of California, Irvine, Medical Center.[vii]
All real fathers sacrifice to raise a healthy family. This means balancing “the pleasure principle” with “the reality principle.” If we are truly rational creatures who seek the ideals we rationalize as our main motivations, then everything is a balancing act between the necessary constraints of reality and the desire for a harmonious equilibrium for ourselves and our loved ones. But as Freud discovered late into his career, there is something “beyond the pleasure principle.” While Mitch Lucker, GG Allin, and the Suicide Boys all have their conscious ego relation to the concept of suicide as a radically autonomous act, they’re nonetheless split subjects like the rest of us.
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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 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] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (An Essay in Atheistic Religion), (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 54
[ii] $SUICIDEBOY$. “Failure by Design.” Genius. https://genius.com/Uicideboy-failure-by-design-lyrics
[iii] Juice WRLD. “Wishing Well.” Genius. https://genius.com/Juice-wrld-wishing-well-lyrics
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