SAARUTU Summer '26

Apply for the new cohort by June 10th | Socioanalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground

If you are interested in doing some original research in the context of a hyperstitional performance of profilicity,¹ then you might consider joining the next SAARUTU cohort. Applications are now available.

SAARUTU: Socioanalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground

SAARUTU has done empirical de-search in 46 cities across the U.S., Europe, and parts of South America and Southeast Asia. It is a hyperstitional and performative work of profilicity that bases itself in philosophical anthropology, critical media theory, and socioanalysis. Learn more about the latter below, after I give you a quick speed run of some of the research threads you could contribute to and learn about in the coming months as a part of this next cohort.

The cohort will be doing deep dives into:

1. Critical Media Theory (Marx, McLuhan, Heidegger, Bourdieu, Postman, Baudrillard, Ellul, Stiegler, et al)

2. Being and Time vs. Philosophical Anthropology (Heidegger vs. Scheler, Binswanger, Gehlen, Plessner)

3. Psychoanalysis vs. Socioanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Bourdieu, Lasch, Goffman, et al.)

4. Das Kapital deep dive (Marx, Heinrich, Mosley, Postone, Karatani, Luxemburg, Hilferding, Grossman, Lenin, Lukács, Rubin, Rosdolsky, Baran and Sweezy, Mandel, Uno, Althusser and Balibar, Backhaus, Arthur, Harvey)

5. Continuation of Philosophy of Stewardship in particular: Natality, Motherhood, and the Family (Arendt, Hrdy, Komisar, Ou, Haseltine, Faust, Bowlby)

6. Levinas and Berry on the Ethics of the Face (Levinas and Berry, with Husserl and Heidegger as the phenomenological background)

7. The Anti-Institutional Canon on Schooling (Illich, Gatto, Postman, MacIntyre, Berry)

8. Variations on Natural Law (Aristotle, Hegel, Burke, Strauss, Manent, MacIntyre)

9. Philosophy of Stewardship, more generally (Xenophon, Berry, Salatin, Fukuoka, Lasch and Harrington)

10. Myth, Secularization, and Modernity (Blumenberg vs. Jung, Evola, Guénon, Eliade, Löwith, Schmitt, Voegelin)

11. Hyperstition, Performativity, and Profilicity (Land, the CCRU, Negarestani, Fisher, Austin, Searle, Derrida, Butler, Lindbeck, Moeller, D’Ambrosio, Luhmann, Goffman)

What IS Socioanalysis?

Socioanalysis is the method that pivots from the subject's stream of consciousness on the couch to the objective structures that manage the relations of production atop the mode of production. Bourdieu names the term himself in the opening lecture of his 1982 Collège de France course, proposing that sociology adopt "those manners of thinking that are usually reserved for the highest objects of thought, those of metaphysics," and confront the social world with questions along the lines of "What does it mean for an institution to exist? What is it that is instituted, and who is it that institutes the instituted?"²

The object is the institutional unconscious, theorized through habitus ("systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures"³) and field (the "rules of the game" governing a social space, in which "the social exists both in things and in bodies"⁴). The master concept of the framework is symbolic capital, which Bourdieu defines as "a transformed and thereby disguised form of physical 'economic' capital" that "produces its proper effect inasmuch, and only inasmuch, as it conceals the fact that it originates in 'material' forms of capital,"⁵ which lets socioanalysis read the cultural-and-credentialed alibi system of the class living above necessary labor as disguised economic extraction. The mechanism that holds these arrangements in place is symbolic violence, which "operates with the complicity of its victim" and is granted "simply through misunderstanding, under the impression of not knowing who is doing what to us": "violence unrecognised is symbolic violence, it is the very definition of symbolic violence."⁶

Its deepest register is the imposition of categories of perception that the dominated turn on themselves, so that they "see themselves as the dominant see them or see themselves through the spectacles the dominant use to look at them."⁷ Socioanalysis is not neutral description but a weapon in the classification struggles through which dominant visions of the world get installed as the world itself ("a vision of the social world, when it is consensual, is the social world, it creates the social world"⁸), and Bourdieu insists that "classification is both weapon and target for social individuals in general; there is no social classification which is not both."⁹

Insofar as it gets picked up at all in modern academia, it is used as identity politics (in 2020 they talked about “white habitus” lol). I’ll sum up why I think it matters: socioanalysis is about self-defense. It is the tool by which you stop being a mouth puppet for a field, mistaking the field’s ideas for your own. The thoughts that feel most natively yours, the tastes that feel most personally yours, the aspirations that feel most authentically yours, are dispositions a field installed in you while you were busy trying to fit in or, increasingly likely, trying to cope with the fact that you did not fit in. Socioanalysis is what you do to recognize the field for what it is, to recognize the habitus it built in you or others for what it is, and to take possession of yourself back from it. It’s the first step for living the examined life in the post class fractured mass.

And it is self-defense from the class that classifies us. The classifications by which the dominant class makes its world go are weapons aimed at us. Socioanalysis is how we read those weapons, take them apart, and refuse to keep handing the classifiers the categories by which they sort us. It is the tool by which a group becomes audible to itself and learns to read the field that has been doing things to it without its consent. Once read, the field can be entered differently, navigated differently, left, or changed.

This is not consolation philosophy. It is a weapon and a key.

One especially cool thing about socioanalysis is that it’s upstream from what Americans learn as “sociology,” an approach that integrates “conflict theory,” “symbolic interactionism,” and “functionalism” without forcing you to choose one of these schools over or against the others.

As I said, TU is the only place on the internet where you can learn socioanalysis. At the peak of French theory, Bourdieu gave all the lectures we need to reconstruct its basic toolkit into a working discipline. Members get access to my introductory lectures that make it accessible, as well as a lot of my introductory writings that have yet to be published.

By keeping socioanalysis grounded in a post-Marxian reading of Das Kapital and a post-Heideggerian reading of Being and Time, and bringing it into conversation with Lacan, Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, et al., we’re able to do something truly amazing.

In this video where I was making the next SAARUTU cohort announcement, I talked about how I just spent the last week having a series of impromptu meetings with three different figures who I’ll leave anonymous for now. They were involved in the writing of the “Skole Kings” piece in Underground Theory Volume II. We’re collaborating on an insanely cool series of briefs and a master reference document for a comparative study of hyperstition vs. performativity theory. This is one branch of SAARUTU that I’ve been pretty private about and that only a few tier 2 and 3 members at TU have been involved in discussions for, until now. I’ll be sharing some of that work soon.

How to join:

Step one · become a member at Theory Underground
Step two · apply to the cohort (DEADLINE June 10th)
Runs · June 15th through July 31st
Plus · acceptance includes 1. an opportunity of a lifetime to be involved in the most cutting edge research on the internet, and 2. an invitation to the gathering at the farm at the end of August.

Thanks for reading!

Notes:

1. Hyperstition and performativity are not the same things, but are related intimately because they relate to retrojection… this is a lot of jargon I cannot unpack here, but stay tuned for some great pieces unpacking it all.

2. Pierre Bourdieu, Habitus and Field: General Sociology, Volume 2 (Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983), trans. Peter Collier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 15.

3. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72.

4. Bourdieu, Habitus and Field, 26.

5. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 183.

6. Bourdieu, Habitus and Field, 145.

7. Bourdieu, Habitus and Field, 311.

8. Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles: General Sociology, Volume 1 (Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982), trans. Peter Collier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 77.

9. Bourdieu, Classification Struggles, 55.