Announcement: Call for Proposals + Update

Transcript of the video "a little theory + opportunities for practice" | Changes & Events

Introduction

All right, everybody, welcome to Theory Underground. This is David McKerracher, and what I want to do right now is give you a quick little update on some of the stuff going on.

Updates on Theory Underground

For those who have paid attention to the releases at the Theory Underground Substack, you’ll know that there is this new theme of asynchronous simultaneity, which is some mumbo jumbo for getting away from a different kind of jargon, which is this other term, synchronic instantaneity. Now, you don’t need to remember those terms. You’ll probably hear them thrown around from time to time, but basically, synchronic instantaneity is about constantly feeling like you’re always with other people in the sense that they will immediately respond. Instantaneity—they’ll instantly respond. It’s a sort of immediate gratification feedback mechanism, something like you’ll experience on a busy Discord, where you have a lot of people who just chat all day, or something that you would experience in a group chat as well.

That’s not going to work for people who are trying to focus on reading, writing, and lectures. It’s not going to work for most of us, right? We’re trying to get away from synchronic instantaneity and focus more on a different kind of being together, a different kind of togetherness that I’ve been referring to as asynchronic simultaneity or asynchronous simultaneity. The asynchronicity is about watching this video at different times. So, you’re watching it at one time, someone else is watching it at a different time, but insofar as you watch this video, you are more or less on the wavelength now, right?

Some people might prefer to watch it several times to really get the point, whereas other people, because they have more priors in common or they’ve already been over a lot of the material that builds up to this concept, don’t need to rewatch it. Maybe they’re just faster learners in general. Of course, there’s a trap there because maybe they’re not faster learners; they just think that they are, and so they assume that they know what’s going on when they really don’t. But I think when it comes to TU folks, there’s generally going to be people who are able to get looped into the wavelength pretty quickly versus those who really want to mull it over and think about it.

Shift in Discussion Format

The big push is to get away from these kinds of conversations that happen immediately after lectures and to move toward discussions only when people have had the time to let the dust settle, to make their own connections, and to come up with critical questions. For the lecture that I did on asynchronous simultaneity versus synchronic instantaneity, what we were able to do was make that a lecture available on demand. Then I had a conversation with the programming team about it. Then I had a conversation that was meant to work for the schedules of the gold and platinum subscribers at TU who are in the United States and wanted to attend. We still had people from Europe joining, but we wanted it to be more evening in the United States, right? Because if you’re trying to make stuff work for both people in the US and Europe at the same time, the result is you’re usually doing stuff earlier in the day in the United States, and that way it’s the evening for people in Europe.

So, we did a US-friendly meeting time, and then we did a Europe-friendly time. We had three discussions for one lecture, and as a result, they were much smaller. The people involved were able to engage more and better because they actually had time to think about it ahead of time. Instead of having 15 or 25 people all sitting there, where only a few people are actually going to get to talk, and everyone had to sit through the lecture, it’s now a much smaller scale.

What that has done for me as a professor is really open up something that I appreciate. It’s something that I wish I could have practiced at the university: do the lecture for everybody and then meet with people in smaller groups. Lots of people have really interesting things to say. Just a couple of comments or questions can really frame the entire discussion.

It was not until the third discussion devoted to that lecture that one of our participants, Luuk, brought up this really important point about why it feels so weird to say asynchronous simultaneity. It’s kind of confusing. Asynchronous makes sense, but to add the word “simultaneous” there makes it almost confusing. It is confusing, and it’s meant to be a contradiction in terms, but it’s one that I’m open to throwing out the window, so to speak. We don’t need it, right? We might not need it, but it seemed useful for me because it’s like we are kind of taking two things that don’t go together and trying to make them work, which is people experiencing on-demand content but in a way that doesn’t just isolate them.

You’re not just experiencing all of this asynchronous material in an on-demand way where it’s just you in your consumer habits, binging all the time, doing whatever you’re interested in. No, it loops back into a conversation with other people. In particular, it loops back into the conversation with the professors who are actually giving the lectures, in this case, me. So, I love this. I love thinking about it. It’s a big shift here at TU, and it’s something that’s been a long time coming.

Reflections on TUCON

TUCON was supposed to be an experiment in asynchronous simultaneity. The idea was everyone was going to be presenting in different breakout rooms at the same times a lot of the time, and then everyone would see one another’s presentations, and there would be more conversations on that basis. But that was really complicated because there were too many proposals accepted, too many papers presented, too many hours for anyone to really watch or get through or engage with meaningfully. It’s one thing for me to watch everything and then engage with it all, but it’s another thing for the people who want to actually be on the wavelength in this emerging school of thought to actually all be able to see one another’s work and then engage with it.

So, it was like we did too much, okay? We went big, and then we went home. Now we’re toning it down. The proper TUCON for the next volume that will be published at Theory Underground is actually going to be in September of 2025. In a lot of cases, there will be people building off of stuff they did at TUCON before, and in many cases, that stuff will be published in this volume.

Call for Proposals

The call for proposals is now. If you’ve got something that pertains to TU as a school of thought, especially to the philosophy of nature, Political Theory 101, fault line theory, and the critique of that through the fundamental problems and core concepts at TU, or if you have a paper about the post-class fractured mass and you’re bringing it into dialogue with political theory, or if you are wanting to do a critique of, say, Nick Land on the basis of nature, nurture, and natality (N3, as we talk about) and you’re thinking about that in relation to the critical doxology and time-energy series that I did, or if you’re thinking about critical media theory and the post-class fractured mass or the PMC, or if you are working on some kind of way of going between or beyond any of these thinkers or schools or ideas, and you think you have something to contribute to the volume, the time to reach out is now at hello@theoryunderground.com.

The papers are being accepted now. The cutoff for that will be the middle of June, and we’re really excited to say that there will be a new volume coming out soon, and it’ll be about all of the stuff that I was just talking about. It’s really about the next phase of TU and about sort of thinking through all of the stuff that has developed up until now.

TUCON 2025 Details

We’ll get together in September, and we’re going to be primarily prioritizing pieces by people who are able to attend in-person. This will probably not be a hybrid event, unlike all of the other ones that were meant to be live-streamed and Zoom calls where anyone could join from anywhere. This one’s going to be a lot more down to earth. It’s going to be a lot more for people who are present, and it’s going to be in North Idaho, specifically Athol, Idaho. I know, Athol—it sounds like “asshole” if you have a lisp when you say it.

Funny thing about that is the location of the event would have been in Careywood, where I grew up, but Careywood is no more. Careywood got swallowed up by Athol. Maybe Athol will just keep expanding until it swallows up the entire world, but for the time being, it is the sort of center of the world of what’s going to be happening here at Theory Underground.

So, if you want to get involved, if you want to come to Athol, Idaho, start thinking about it right now. Submit to us a piece ASAP. If you want to first float one or three proposals at me, go for it. Send them to hello.theoryunderground@gmail.com. But if you have a piece, either from the previous TUCON or that you’ve been working on anyway, that you think would be a good fit, now’s the time to be sending it over. Get it to us; we’re very interested in looking at these things over the next month.

Instead of presenting it here at TUCON in September, you would be on a panel where the other people on that panel have already read your paper, and everyone will be assumed to have already read your piece. [The goal is that you’ll have a physical copy of the first edition of the volume before TUCON] Then there’ll just be a conversation about it. We’re not going to be doing presentations this time around, and that’s an experimental thing. It’s a choice; we’re figuring it out.

There will be opportunities for room and board here. There will also be opportunities for room and board nearby. The registration cost is $500 for academics and $250 for non-academics. The event is going to be four days long, in the middle of September, but we don’t have the precise date set until we hear back from a couple of the participants that we’re trying to plan around because we’re going to have some special speakers and personalities here. So, yeah, lots to look forward to on that front.

Future Events: Internship and Workshops

The other thing is, also be thinking about something really cool that’s coming mid-April to mid-May 2026. Here, we’re going to have a sort of internship, WWOOF-style bridging of the life and mind that is a couple of weeks long, where you actually learn how to do some stuff on the farm as well as have lots of audio-listening opportunities followed up by discussions around campfires. That’ll be a room-and-board kind of thing. It’ll be a proper series of workshops, also including delicious food, farm-to-table, the whole works.

That’ll be something that we will be releasing more information about soon, but I wanted to kind of just put it on your radar as something that is coming up, and I’m really excited to be organizing it. For that one, I think it would be more like $1,000 for the whole package, right? So, start saving up, start planning, getting a plane ticket for between mid-April and mid-May.

Even if you’re the kind of person who’s just a lurker who’s never going to, or at least you don’t think you’ll ever really get involved, don’t worry about it. Lots of really cool content will come out of this stuff that we’re doing at this more small-scale level with people. When you do stuff with bigger paywalls, it means that you get to filter to the top people who are most serious, most invested in their own learning, and in really grasping these concepts and in applying them to their own lives and in actually contributing or intervening in this emerging school of thought and, ultimately, movement for timenergy, and for T3 institutions and for soul-soil cycles and the whole nine yards of things.

In a lot of cases, you don’t really know that much about these if you haven’t read my new book, and you haven’t because it’s not been released. The only people who will know about any of this stuff are probably people who’ve been paying a lot of attention through the Being in Time lecture series that I did, through the Totality and Infinity lecture series that I did,¹ or through the ongoing seminars that I have been giving, as well as the Fundamental Problems and Core Concepts at TU lecture series.

Levinas Course Update

Last note: the Levinas course continues. We did the first half of Totality and Infinity last year, and I’ll be teaching the second half of Totality and Infinity this October. That’s when it kicks off. It’ll go from October through November. We’ll be doing the last half of Totality and Infinity, one of the most amazing works of philosophy of all time. Lots of people have critiques of this work, and those are superficial critiques. Other people, like Judith Butler or Simon Critchley, can have something really interesting to say about Levinas, but because of their progressive leftism, they tend to miss the most interesting and even edgy things going on there that he is doing, which is so important for really engaging with if you want to do political phenomenology or think deeply about our current situation.

How would you sign up for that course? You just become a subscriber at Theory Underground, and if you actually want to get involved, go for the higher tiers. You do that at theoryunderground.com/subscribe.

Closing Remarks

This is pretty much just an update video that I wanted to do. I can’t really think of anything else that I need to say right now about any of that. I’ve got to go run some errands, so I just wanted to do this as a quick little update because we want to start thinking ahead about these things coming up. Hold on, let me think about it. Come on, do you remember? We’re talking about September when the TUCON thing is happening. We’re talking about October-November when Totality and Infinity is happening. We’re talking mid-April to mid-May for different opportunities for small cohorts to go through a series of workshops and a sort of internship here on the farm. Like I said, it’s kind of like WWOOF, but with brains added into the mix.

If you don’t know about WWOOF, it’s called Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF). Well, this would be like WWOOF, except different, because it’s going to be a bridge between the work of the hands and the life of the mind, between the work of the soil and the work of the soul, between the discovery of talents and the cultivation of those under tutelage, using freed-up time-energy, both in practical applications in ways of becoming stewards of the earth, as well as actually thinking big ideas and doing so as rigorously as we can.

If you’re interested in doing that in a place that is neither left nor right, that is not post-, anti-, or political, but kind of a mixture of all of those tendencies, then Theory Underground might be the place for you, and you might want to check it out. Thank you. Peace.

Thanks for reading.

On the other side of this paywall you can access the Totality and Infinity course. You can obviously get to the other side of this paywall by becoming a subscriber here on the Substack. However, that is not the best way. The best way to access content at TU is by becoming a subscriber to TU from TU’s own website (and app in the works). From there you can access all ongoing, upcoming, and past courses/seminars. https://theoryunderground.com/subscribe